Freud- The Key Ideas

by Ruth Snowden

  The conflicting needs of society versus the individual lead to a constant battle between ego and altruism. The essence of this battle is – ‘do I answer my own needs, or do I try to fit in with other people?’ Freud suggests that this battle is what causes neurosis and that it is possible that entire civilizations can develop a sort of mass neurosis and a communal super-ego. An obvious example would be the dictator leading the mass of followers. Freud’s view of human nature became increasingly disillusioned and he felt that people constantly underestimated the things of true value in life, tending instead to value power, status and wealth. These words certainly have a prophetic ring to them in the modern world.

  Curiously however, Freud seems to abandon his usual stance that sexual urges are the all-important driving force when he speaks about the conflict between the individual and society. He says that most people can fulfil their sexual needs within the confines of society’s rules. The thing they really cannot cope with is their neighbours, because people are by nature aggressive and obnoxious towards others. However, he considered the Christian solution to this problem, crystallized in the commandments, ‘thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’ and, ‘love thine enemies’, to be impossible in any practical sense. Instead, he suggested that each individual try to become aware of his own repressed conflicts and cope with his own aggressive urges through a process of self-enlightenment. His hope was that eventually people would be able to abandon religion and that the intellect would reign supreme.

  Religion

  Freud was an atheist and basically dismissed the whole idea of there being a god, saying that this was an illusion created to protect people from their insecurity when they have outgrown their parents. He seems to base all his ideas on patriarchal, monotheistic religions and very much emphasizes the idea of God as a father figure. Because he sees religion as an illusion he suggests that ideally it should be abandoned. He admits, however, that this would be difficult in practice because religion forms the basis for our rules of law and order, and the human race is not sufficiently advanced yet to cope without it.

  Totem and Taboo is a collection of four essays, which had originally been published separately, that looks at religious ideas within primitive societies. It is subtitled Some points of agreement between the mental life of savages and neurotics so, clearly, Freud was trying to draw parallels between the behaviour of primitive people and the problems encountered by his patients. Freud attempted to explore the way things had worked in primitive societies, before civilization had grown up and imposed all the suppressive influences suffered by modern humans. At the time when Totem and Taboo was written there was still very poor understanding of primitive, preliterate societies, so many of Freud’s ideas don’t have much foundation in truth, and much of his source information is now discredited. It was generally assumed that the descent of man had followed an orderly progress – from infantile ‘savages’ to the wonderful pinnacle of greatness that humankind occupied by the beginning of the twentieth century. Today, this vision of progress seems arrogant and in many ways misguided because we are beginning to realize that we have got a lot of things very sadly wrong and our so-called primitive ancestors have much to teach us about how to behave.

  Freud said that many primitive people have special totems, such as animals, plants or other natural objects such as stones, which are held in symbolic reverence.

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  Insight

  A totem is held in symbolic reverence and also watches over the tribe and helps to define certain social behaviours. Special myths are usually associated with the totem.

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  Groups of people share a particular totem and this tends to define their social rules, in that members of a totem group are usually forbidden from having sexual relationships. Freud noticed that many such totems took on animal forms and he assumed that these animals represented protectors. He observed two contradictory customs in association with totem animals:

  the animal must not be hunted, killed or eaten, because it represents the essence of the tribal god

  but an annual feast would be held, involving rituals where the animal was killed and eaten.

  Freud suggested that modern laws forbidding murder and incest had their origin in such practices. His theory is that a primitive tribe would form a patriarchy, where one particular leader had total power to decree sexual laws and taboos. Such a society depends upon strict sexual laws to define relationships between families. These laws are the basis of culture and communication.

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  Insight

  A taboo is a strong social prohibition against certain behaviours, words, concepts, actions, subjects of discussion and so on. Breaking a taboo is usually considered unacceptable and may even be illegal. On the other hand it can sometimes be fun and liberating!

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  Freud assumes that the totem represents the father of the tribe. This patriarch would expel all the younger males and keep all the females for himself. Eventually, the outcast young sons would rebel, banding together and returning to kill the patriarch in order to gain power. Their resulting guilt is expressed and expunged in the symbolic annual feast, where the totem is killed and eaten. Freud draws parallels here with the Oedipus story, saying that it is evidently universal that men desire their mothers and wish to kill their fathers. His thinking reflects the view current at the time; that primitive people are infantile in their behaviour.

  Freud suggests that these ambivalent totemic religious practices are similar to the behaviour of people suffering from obsessional neurosis, which is a mental illness characterized by obsessional urges or ideas. In both cases he suggests that guilt is strongly present because a rule against incest has been broken. The obsessional neurosis is a defence against the incestuous urges of childhood, whereas the totemic feast represents the same kind of defence on a larger scale. It seems that Freud is guilty of generalizing again here – it is likely that in many cases of obsessional neurosis later events in life are the underlying cause, rather than events occurring in early childhood. For example, in a well-known case from literature, Lady Macbeth endlessly washes her hands as a symbolic way of cleansing herself of the blood of a murdered victim.

  Freud also explores the idea of omnipotence of thoughts – the idea that if you think something it is more likely to happen. Freud observed this kind of omnipotence in his obsessional patients and in the fantasies of childhood. Primitive people have no problem with the idea, because to them there is no sharp division between internal and external reality. Later, however, they transfer the omnipotent power to their gods and, eventually, in the light of scientific rationality, it is abandoned altogether. Therefore, said Freud, religion is simply the tail end of a tribal neurosis.

  Much of Freud’s thinking in Totem and Taboo was based on theories such as those in Darwin’s Descent of Man, which are now mostly discredited. For example, the totemic feast he describes is actually rare in tribes who have totems, and there is no evidence that humans ever lived in tribes dominated by a single male as do some other primates. He also overlooks the fact that some primitive people actually have matriarchal societies.

  According to Freud, the Moses story has the same basic theme of breaking an incestual taboo. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud suggests that Moses was not actually Jewish in origin, but Egyptian. Following the revolutionary teaching of the pharaoh Akhenaten, Moses rejected the idea of a whole pantheon of gods, and began to teach his tribesmen the idea that there was only one, supreme father god. Eventually Moses led his people out of Egypt to find the Promised Land, but Freud suggests that he was subsequently murdered by some of his own tribesmen who then experienced God’s wrath. They could only escape from this uncomfortable situation by promising total obedience to God from then on. The whole unfortunate episode gave rise to a lasting sense of guilt in the Jewish people, and to a longing for a messiah who could come and sort it all out. Not surprisingly, Moses and Monotheism is one of Freud’s less popular book
s.

  According to Freud, the principle tasks of civilization are:

  to defend people against the perils of nature, such as famine, flood and disease

  to control and regulate instincts such as incest, cannibalism and lust for killing

  to demonstrate achievements that are considered worth striving for.

  He suggested that ‘the gods’ evolved to play a parental role, protecting people and watching over them. Their task was:

  to protect people from the perils of nature

  to reconcile people to the cruelty of fate, especially death

  to compensate for the suffering imposed by civilization.

  Freud was chiefly concerned with the psychological significance of the suggested functions of religion. Religious rituals give the individual protection from the unruly libidinal urges arising from within and so enable the person to function within a group. Religion has another advantage – it promises an after life, which not only lessens the fear of death but also suggests that the person will be rewarded eventually for suppressing some of his instinctive urges. Freud does not seem to have understood the ecstatic and mystical states that many people associate with religion, and barely considers them at all. He dismisses such states, comparing them with being in love. Both states, he says, are examples of regression to a very early stage, where the individual has not learned to distinguish himself from his mother, or from the external world.

  Although he had a tendency to generalize on the basis of very slim evidence, Freud claimed to be offering scientific explanations for all these ideas about religion; at the same time he was very dismissive of religious teachings because they were not scientific. He was not very interested in philosophy either, saying dismissively that it was mere playing with words. He argued that people should always try to be down-to-earth in their thinking and view the world objectively – curiously, he seems here to overlook the role of the unconscious in human thinking.

  Freud always claimed to be a scientific thinker.

  At the heart of Freud’s criticism of religion is the fact that its teachings cannot be verified. To Freud religious ideas are illusions – fulfilments of the oldest, most primal needs. Religious questions lead people to be introspective and not scientific and this can lead towards self-deception. Freud does, rather grudgingly, admit that religious teachings have undoubtedly helped to build and maintain civilization, but says that they have also discouraged free thinking. He also admits that he too may be chasing an illusion, concluding that although science itself is not an illusion we may place too much emphasis upon its teachings.

  Thoughts about war

  During the First World War, Freud at first supported the Austro-German Alliance for which members of his family fought. However, he was a pacifist at heart and became very disillusioned with war.

  In 1915 he wrote two short pieces describing his thoughts about war. He expressed his bewilderment as the nations of the civilized world slaughtered one another and destroyed so much that science, technology and art had strived to achieve. Freud recognized the gap between what passes as acceptable behaviour for a state and what is expected of the individual. He also saw that the state demanded complete obedience from its people, and yet treated them like children by its censorship of the truth. His sense of disillusionment increased as he observed:

  the low morality shown in the behaviour of states

  the brutality that emerged in the behaviour of individuals, who used war as an excuse to unleash aggression.

  Freud said that these two observations proved that deep down human nature consists of instinctive impulses, therefore we can never totally eradicate evil. A person can be ‘good’ in one set of circumstances and ‘bad’ in another. People conform and obey because they both need love and fear punishment.

  Freud is not really trying to say that it is impossible for humans to behave in a civilized fashion. He actually says that people have overestimated their own capabilities – we are not as highly evolved as we had thought we were. If we were less demanding of ourselves, this would lead to less disillusionment and the ability to be more open and honest.

  The war made Freud think about people’s attitude towards death. Before the war he said people had tended to pretend that death did not exist. War forced them to believe in it and took them back to a primeval state when death was a part of life’s daily struggle, and man had no scruples about killing. It was Freud’s work with victims of war trauma and shell shock that led him to develop his ideas about repetition compulsion (whereby the sufferer repeats often trivial actions) and Thanatos, the death instinct (see Chapter 8).

  Freud lived to see the start of the Second World War as well. Hitler had come to power in Germany in 1933 and there was a public burning of Freud’s books in Berlin. Freud saw this as progress, saying that it was an improvement upon what would have happened in the Middle Ages, when they would have burned him too. Little did he realize what horrors were about to be unleashed and how wrong he was about the idea of progress – fortunately Freud was spared the horror of the Holocaust, although several members of his family were victims. One wonders what he would have thought and felt about it. His fellowship with other Jews mattered to him and he had belonged to a Jewish club in Vienna, even though he did not follow the Jewish religion.

  Another Jew to flee from Nazism was Albert Einstein, and a letter from him in 1932 persuaded Freud to write again about war. Freud replied that war was more a problem for statesmen to worry about, but he tried to arrive at some psychological insights:

  Usually conflicts of interest among humans are settled by the use of violence.

  Several weak people can combine to overcome one strong one.

  A community is held together by emotional ties.

  Problems arise within a community when suppressed members begin to want more power.

  The instincts of love and hate are both essential – you cannot have one without the other.

  Freud therefore concluded that war could only be prevented if a central authority was set up which had the right to settle all conflicts of interest. To this end he suggested educating a special elite, with independent open minds, who would ‘give direction to the dependent masses’. Ironically, this sounds curiously similar to what the Nazis had in mind. In the final paragraph of the letter, Freud speaks of himself and, by implication, Einstein, as pacifists, but he adds that there is no telling how long it will be until the rest of mankind follows suit.

  Art and literature

  Freud wrote about art and literature partly in order to verify his own theories about neurotic symptoms, dreams, jokes and parapraxes, and partly to try to create a theory of culture from the viewpoint of psychoanalysis. He said that writers and artists had great insight into the workings of the unconscious, which he saw underlying all cultural and psychic phenomena. He ranked the works of Homer, Sophocles, Goethe and Shakespeare as being especially great – and conveniently they fitted in well with his psychoanalytical interpretations. Because he saw the unconscious underlying all art and literature, he said that the usual psychic mechanisms were at work within them, for example repression of unacceptable urges, condensation, displacement and so on. In fact, he believed that basically all art and literature was the result of the sublimation of libidinous urges. Daydreams and fantasies were ways of evading the tedious grip of the reality principle. Artists and writers actually allowed themselves to live in their fantasy world, effectively evading the reality principle and then using their fantasies in creative ways. This cunningly avoids the worse peril of becoming a sexual pervert or neurotic, and at the same time converts the subjective repressed material into an objective, socially acceptable form. The work that is created can then have a powerful effect on others, even those who are not personally known to the artist and who are not aware of the source of their own emotion, i.e. their own repressed libidinal urges.

  LEONARDO DA VINCI

  Freud gives an example of this phenomenon at work in the l
ife of a creative artist in a short work called Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood (published in 1910; see Volume XI of the Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud). In this study, Freud uses psychoanalysis to examine Leonardo’s emotional life from early childhood and, in particular, his alleged homosexuality. He argues that Leonardo’s work is a prime example of libidinal urges being sublimated into creative work: in an age where art was often sensual, Leonardo’s art is not expressly sexual, therefore repression is obviously at work.

  Freud then goes on to look at an interesting recollection of the artist’s early childhood, which is recorded in one of Leonardo’s many notebooks. In this recollection, presumably a fantasy or a dream, a vulture flies down to his cradle and, opening his mouth with its tail, strikes him many times upon the lips. Freud interprets this odd vision as expressing repressed homosexuality, where the bird’s tail represents the penis. The urge to take this organ into the mouth is a regression to the earliest stage of the child’s existence, the oral stage, when he would have suckled his mother’s breast. Freud says there is a link here with Egyptian mythology too, where vultures were supposed to be only of the female sex.

  There are several flaws in Freud’s argument here. The bird in Leonardo’s fantasy was not actually a vulture at all, but a kite, so the tenuous link to Egyptian mythology is wrong. As far as we can tell, evidence certainly points to Leonardo having been homosexual, and this would in part account for his rather secretive nature, for one could be burned at the stake in those days if proved to be homosexual. But whether he really repressed his homosexual urges is much less clear – he surrounded himself most of his adult life with beautiful young men, in particular one called Salai, who was his special companion for many years. So although his homosexuality is probably expressed in his art – many of his figures are notably androgynous – he scarcely seems to have been sublimating his desires. Freud also suggests that there is conflict between Leonardo’s artistic and scientific streaks. Again there is no real evidence for this – Leonardo was a prolific and original thinker in both the analytical and creative fields and seems to have coped very happily with the two strands – indeed, they are probably the source of his genius. His renowned slowness and unreliability in completing work is seen by Freud as a symptom of inhibition, but it seems more likely, given his prodigious output, that he simply frequently got bored with a project and moved on to something else.