Heritage and Foundations

by Alain de Benoist

  ‘I have cited the example of the gentleman who collected the hulls of boats. It is probable that this person has a nostalgia for the sea, where he had perhaps lived as a child. The psychoanalyst, for his part, will seek a symbol. He thinks that the hull of the boat is the belly of the mother, and that the gentleman collects the hulls because he suffers from an Oedipus complex. This is foolish!’

  Another example: ‘For Freud, the gentleman who has a phobia of door knobs is not afraid of microbes at all; rather he sees the door knob as the symbol of his father’s penis! Similarly, for the psychoanalyst, the crisis of epilepsy will be the ‘symbolic equivalent’ of orgasm, etc. We are fully in the domain of magical thinking’.

  And yet Freud had a sense of humour. One day, when he was fiddling with a cigar, he declared to a disciple who raised his eyebrow: ‘You see, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’. Arthur Koestler adds: ‘I know a few contemporary analysts who would prefer to castrate themselves before admitting this’.

  In the ideological posterity of Freud, Mélanie Klein occupies an important place. It was she who, in the twenties, began to apply psychoanalytic theories to the young infant (less than thirty months). This translated into blatantly delusional theories at the extremes of unintelligibility.

  ‘For all little boys’, writes Mélanie Klein, ‘a moving car represents masturbation and coitus; two cars that meet each other also represent coitus, while the comparison between two cars of different dimensions expresses rivalry with the father and his penis’ (Le psychanalyse de l’enfant).

  Claims of this kind at first provoke a smile. Until the moment that psychoanalyst René Spitz undertook to ‘update’ them by affirming, notably, that the whole development of the adult is explained by the nature of the relations between the mother and the child during the first months!

  This theory, which senselessly exploits a reality well-known to ethologists (the fact that imprinting, i.e. emotional ‘imprint’, is particularly strong during the ‘sensitive period’ following birth), has had the most serious consequences.

  ‘To say, for example’, emphasises Dr. Pierre Debray-Ritzen, ‘that mental debility is due to the fact that a child was unloved by its mother during the first months of its life, is absolutely outrageous. It is vile ignorance. First because it is not true: the causes of mental debility are varied and are coming to be well known (there are metabolic dysfunctions, hereditary defects, diseases of the egg during pregnancy, etc.). In addition, it is an abuse of confidence, because it is claimed that psychotherapy will improve the child’s condition. And at the end of a year or eighteen months we see the mothers blamed, and they come in and complain that they have been deceived’.

  Dr. Debray-Ritzen does not hide his pessimism. ‘A torrent of logos’, he writes, ‘spreads over the world without any kind of scientific rigor, which openly turns its back on knowledge and stirs up senseless concepts in exactly the same way that one would turn prayer wheels’. And to quote the terrible words of Chekhov: ‘It is said that truth will triumph in the end, but it is not true’.

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  La scolastique freudienne, by Pierre Debray-Ritzen. Fayard, 272 pages.

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  The appearance of the book by Pierre Debray-Ritzen, which has aroused numerous echoes in the press, seems to have given the launch of an anti-Freudian campaign by the public at large (cf. for example the article by Eric Chamberlain, Bye bye, docteur Freud in Jacinte, February 1976).

  In October 1974, a polemic in the columns of the Figaro contrasted Professor Debray-Ritzen to the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, founder of the ‘orthogenic’ school of Chicago, which was featured on television in a series of particularly laudatory programs. Bettelheim (who is neither a medical doctor nor a psychiatrist) has claimed, in The Empty Fortress (The Free Press, 1967)499 that autism (a particularly serious childrens’ disorder which completely cuts the child off from the exterior world) was exclusively the product of psycho-affective factors induced by the environment. Debray-Ritzen has responded that these claims are ‘outrageously ignorant’. He clarifies: ‘I refute the permanent reference of psychoanalysis to the supposed responsibility of the parents. In the current state of our knowledge of autism, only biochemical, genetic, and psychopharmacological research allows us to make progress’.

  From Oedipus to Moses

  During a trip to Athens in 1904, Sigmund Freud visited the Acropolis with his brother. Thirty years later, in a letter to Romain Rolland, he confessed to having been seized that day by a ‘temporary feeling of alienation’.500 A revealing episode of an ambiguous life.

  Was it necessary to be Jewish in order to invent psychoanalysis? In a letter to Pastor Pfister, Freud replied in the affirmative. Marthe Robert, an accomplished Germanist, a Kafka specialist, a translator of Goethe and Nietzsche, wanted to clarify the meaning of this response.

  That Freud felt himself to be, in a certain way, the heir of Jewish culture seems to be certain. And we know that until his death he was a member of the Free Lodge of the B’nai B’rith. And his letters are revealing.

  In 1908 he wrote to Karl Abraham: ‘Remember, I beg you, that affinities of race bring you closer to my intellectual temperament’. In 1928, to Enrico Morselli: ‘Although I have long been detached from the religion of my ancestors, I have never lost the feeling of solidarity towards my people’.

  After the death of the English psychoanalyst David Eder in 1936, he wrote to his sister-in-law: ‘We are Jews, the both of us, and we both knew too that we had in common what I know of the miraculous, hitherto inaccessible to analysis, which is characteristic of the Jew’.

  The vast majority of Freud’s disciples were also Jewish: Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, Sandor Ferenczi, Theodor Reik, Alfred Adler, Mélanie Klein, Tausk, Stekel, etc.

  One exception, however, is Carl G. Jung. When he separated from him, Freud wrote to the psychiatrist Ludwig Biswanger: ‘In all this there is only one serious thing: the Semites and the Aryans or anti-Semites, which I wanted to bring together in order to fuse them in the service of psychoanalysis, are once again beginning to separate like oil and water’.

  A Persistent Discomfort

  Talmudic thought has often been reconciled with the approach of psychoanalysis. For Manès Sperber, Freudianism is ‘psychologisation of the Old Testament’ (The Achilles Heel. Doubleday, 1960).501 In 1964, Professor David Bakan of the University of Chicago published an essay entitled Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (D. Van Nostrand, 1958).502 More recently, Dr. Percival Bailey presented Freud as a ‘lay rabbi’, whose attitude regarding sex is that of the Kabbala (Sigmund der Unserene: A Tragedy in Three Acts. Charles C. Thomas, 1965).503

  This opinion is shared by Ernst Jimon: ‘The resemblance between the world of the Talmud and the spiritual world in which Freud lived is not due solely to the similarity of form on the level of the association technique. It is in Judaism that we must seek the secret of Freud’s work’.

  Hence the sentiment of Kafka, as reported by Marthe Robert: ‘Freud’s work, rather, is a chapter in Jewish history written by the present generation, and in a way it forms the most recent of the commentaries on the Talmud, and any extension to which it is prone resides in this’.

  However, this does not explain the (re)emergence, in an unbelieving Jew, of an inheritance which he only seems to have received in scattered pieces.

  Freud’s mother spoke a German still indistinct from Yiddish. His father, Jakob, from the Hasidic circles of Galicia, probably preserved the distinctive allure of a pious western European Jew. Originating from Hasidic circles, he had nevertheless abandoned ancestral Judaism, and upon his death in 1896, he left ‘the most gifted of his sons in an ambiguous position, midway between a logical rupture and an impossible fidelity’.

  All throughout his life, Sigmund Freud was necessarily divided between ‘two stories, two cultures, two forms of thought: on the one hand, that of the Jewish people, nourished by the Bible and the Talmud, the source of an intensely lived tradition; on
the other hand, western humanism, Classical and Germanic culture. In a word, the “other side”’.

  In his work, innumerable biblical references exist alongside quotations from his favourite authors: Goethe, Lessing, Shakespeare, Virgil, and Sophocles.

  But at home, this duality does not give rise to a harmonious synthesis. On the contrary, it provokes a persistent discomfort.

  Engaged in two cultures without belonging exclusively to any one, he finds in this interior suspense a certain intellectual freedom as well as additional knowledge, but also a rending, and here Marthe Robert comes close to seeing the inception of the Freudian edifice.

  The same ambivalence exists towards the surrounding society: ‘While on the Jewish side, people, for Freud, form a familiar reality that reassures with its warmth and proximity, on the other side there is something occult and even harmful; it is the Sphinx, the absent one, who there is every reason to fear as soon as he appears on the historical scene’.

  In 1926 Freud declares at a B’nai B’rith gathering: ‘As a Jew, I was prepared: join the opposition and renounce any agreement with the united majority’.

  The high places of European culture attract him even as they repel him. For years, a kind of inhibition prevented him from going to Rome, a city with which he had formed a ‘singular love affair’, but where the Arch of Titus remained the symbol of an abhorrent power. (‘It is because he is Jewish that he cannot go to Rome’, writes Marthe Robert).

  The analysis of his ‘Roman dreams’ (and some others) reveals a certain tendency towards repression: ‘He redacted the sexual content of his dreams’.

  Thus Freud never ceased to play two characters. The carnal son of Jakob, he would have liked to have had a father like Hamilcar, who made his son swear to fight Rome until his last breath. The spiritual son of Goethe, he would like to be, as Napoleon was, the son of his works alone.

  Two fathers is one too many.

  A veneration mingled with terror and perhaps a secret jealousy: this feeling of the Hebrews in regards to Yahweh defines the relationship to the father as Freud feels it — and as he will present it in his theory of the Oedipus complex.

  The same theme, it is true, is found in the Jewish tradition as well as in the Hellenic tradition. But in different forms: that of a patricide in the kingdom of Laius (Oedipus kills his father, thus fulfilling destiny), that of a (deferred) infanticide among the Hebrews (Abraham, to comply with Yahweh, agrees to sacrifice Isaac).

  Naturally, Freud prefers to take his inspiration from the Greek narrative: by endowing it with a new lineage or parentage, it raises him, like Oedipus, ‘to a kind of royalty’.

  The theme of patricide is present in The Interpretation of Dreams. It is presented again in Totem and Taboo. It culminates in Moses and Monotheism (1934), a ‘historical novel’ where Freud, towards the end of his life, made Moses a noble Egyptian who was initiated into monotheism by the pharaoh Akhenaton and ultimately put to death by the Jews.

  As Freud declared to Arnold Zweig: ‘It is Moses who made the Jew’. If Moses himself were only an adoptive Jew, there would no longer be a problem.

  We thus begin to see the portrait of a double-faced Freud: at once bourgeois and revolutionary, respectful of conventions and deeply subversive (in the sense that the Prophets were the ‘subversives’ of their time), whose theories, though ‘born from a humanistic culture which, at the turn of the nineteenth century, formed the pride and power of the ruling class, nevertheless represents the most radically destructive act against which the bourgeoisie has ever had to defend itself’.

  This is what brings Freud close to Karl Marx.

  On Responsibility

  The first was raised in the philosophical spirit of the Enlightenment (Aufklärung). The second grew up in the spiritual milieu of leftist Hegelianism (Feuerbach, Moses, Hess). In relation to German society, they feel both assimilated and different at the same time. And it is not until the bond linking Marx and Engels that the relationship of Freud and Wilhelm Fliess is evoked.

  Can we also say, in terms of psychoanalysis, that they both assumed and interiorised the paternal responsibility on the basis of an identification?

  Karl Marx was the grandson of Rabbi Marx Lévy and the nephew of Rabbi Samuel Marx. But his father had converted to Protestantism to escape the situation of the Jews after the annexation of the Rhineland to Prussia. And yet his book, On the Jewish Question (1843),504 written at the age of twenty-five, will be considered one of the classics of ‘leftist anti-Semitism’. (It is only later that Marx will combine philosophical materialism with an idealistic pauperism strongly tinged with Messianism).

  In Marx et la question juive (Gallimard, 1972),505 Robert Misrahi, a lecturer at the University of Paris I, writes: ‘The origin of Marx’s anti-Semitism is Marx himself’. ‘Marx’s identification with his father’, he adds, ‘is the reflexive interiorisation of a negation operated by the model (the father) with respect to his own negative model, the Jewish religious family’.

  Likewise born out of Freud’s desire to escape from a father whom he venerated consciously but feared and even hated unconsciously, psychoanalysis is probably the most imposing system of repression and self-justification ever conceived: Freud is delivered from his phantasms by projecting them onto humanity. He has generalised this particular case, which was his own, by making it no longer appear as such — and by creating at the same time the conditions for its redemption. (If the legs of ordinary people were cut off, dwarves would no longer have complexes). Psychoanalysis is a ‘family saga’ — written impersonally.

  Freud proceeded undercover, undermining his era from within, just as he placed man in question by departing from himself. This is how he was able to gain credibility, and how he was able to win the victory of his dreams over eternal Rome.

  ‘Thus’, writes Marthe Robert, ‘psychoanalysis does not have the sole purpose of making the conscious life communicate with the unconscious part of the psyche; it also serves as an intermediary between two forms of culture and thought by founding a distinct and independent order of knowledge that breaks radically with the religious and philosophical tradition of the west. Henceforth, whenever western civilization, concerned with all that stirs the foundations of everything it has created, formed, and thought, will be driven to interrogate its spiritual infrastructure, it will be necessary for it to pass through the new law which denounces the old or at least declares it obsolete’.

  And Freud, supremely skilful, will leave centuries ‘perplexed before the mystery of his identity’.

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  D’Oedipe à Moïse, by Marthe Robert.506 Calmann-Lévy, 279 pages.

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  On the ambiguous attitude of Karl Marx on the place of Jewish culture, cf. the book by Jacques Hermione, La gauche, Israël et les Juifs (Round Table, 1970),507 which places the polemics raised by the publication of On the Jewish Question in the more general context of an ‘anti-Semitism of the left’. Marx writes that ‘Jewish emancipation consists in emancipating humanity from Judaism’. He adds: ‘We recognise in Judaism a generally present antisocial element which, through the development to which the Jews have actively participated in this bad relationship, has been pushed to its highest point in the present time, a height where it can only necessarily disintegrate’. M. Hermione concludes that for Marx, ‘everything is reduced to the will to suppress the Jew, and therefore to the search for what can lead to his suppression’. An opposing view is expressed by Robert Mandrou, in his preface to the latest French edition of On the Jewish Question (La question juive, UGE-10/18, 1968).

  Examining her ‘relationship with Freud’, Hélène Cixous declares: ‘In my last texts, I situated Moses as a typical male character, that is, a limited power, a phallus threatened with castration. Castration, the Bible, in fact, is brimming; this is so much the world of threat that it is not by chance that Freud comes from it: psychoanalysis is the Bible of the phallus’ (Les Nouveaux cahiers, autumn 1976).

  Pedago
gical

  The Theses of Jean Piaget

  ‘At the age of thirteen months’, remark Rémy Droz and Maryvonne Rahmy, ‘one of Piaget’s daughters designates a dog by vouaou, then, within a few months, this term is applied to the owner of the dog, to geometric drawings, a horse, two horses, a baby carriage with a baby and a lady, chickens, cyclists, etc. At the age of sixteen months, this term seems definitively reserved for the dog.

  The observation seems insignificant. It verifies, however, the validity of one of the propositions of a fundamental science: the psychology of the child.

  At the end of 1966, Jean Piaget’s work encompassed more than twenty thousand pages of published text. Considerable, but not flashy, and covering several domains (biology, psychology, pedagogy, sociology, ‘genetic epistemology’) it has continued to remain at the forefront for forty years — without ever being fashionable.

  Born in Neufchâtel in 1896, a doctor of science at the age of twenty-two, Piaget oriented himself before long towards psychology. His first works made him known immediately. In 1952, he became professor of genetic psychology at the Sorbonne. He is currently co-director of the Institute of Educational Sciences, a Professor at the Faculty of Science in Geneva, and director of the Centre for Genetic Epistemology, which has gathered international researchers since 1955.

  Differences in Structure

  His works are divided between purely experimental studies and works of popularisation. Among the first are: The Child’s Construction of Reality (1937),508 Judgement and Reasoning in the Child (1947),509 The Child’s Conception of Geometry (1948),510 Biology and Knowledge (1967).511 And among the second: Six Psychological Studies (1964),512 The Psychology of the Child (1966),513 Genetic Epistemology (1970),514 and Psychology and Epistemology (1970).515