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Introductory: Toward a Theory of Culture
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Literature and sociology have long supplied eloquent and know- ing professional mourners at the wake for Christian culture. After Matthew Arnold, much of modern poetry constitutes an elegiac farewell (mixed with powerful feelings of good rid- dance) to the religious culture of the West. After Auguste Comte, much of modern sociology has struggled for diagnostic
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ideas refined and yet wide enough to encompass the spectacle of be, by a certain disorganization of personality, may have run its course. The long period of deconversion , which first broke the surface of political history at the time of the French Revolution, appears all but ended. The central symbolism of personal and corporate experience seems to me well on its way to being differently organized, with several systems of belief competing for primacy in the task of organizing personality in the West. Beyond its concern with the dynamics by which Christian culture has been displaced, the present volume will concentrate upon a struggle within the camp of one among these displacing systems of belief; I intend drawing certain implications for the reorgani- zation of Western culture and personality from the divergence between Freud and those of his most powerful successor-critics studied in this book-C. G. Jung, Wilhelm Reich, and D. H. Lawrence. In Freud's analytic attitude and in the efforts exerted by his successor-critics to go beyond it, to post-communal faiths, there are concentrated some aspects of a theoretical prob lem that interests me greatly, well beyond the limits of this book: the problem of explaining cultural change. These prelimi nary studies in the psychohistorical process are not aimed pri- marily at fellow theorists interested in the problem, but at those troubled readers in whose minds and hearts one culture is dying while no other gains enough power to be born.
As cultures change, so do the modal types of personality that are their bearers. The kind of man I see emerging, as our culture fades into the next, resembles the kind once called "spiritual" because such a man desires to preserve the inherited morality freed from its hard external crust of institutional discipline. Yet a culture survives principally, I think, by the power of its institu- tions to bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons which sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood~with that understanding
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of which explicit belief and precise knowledge of externals would show outwardly like the tip of an iceberg. Spiritualizers of religion (and precisians of science) failed to take into account the degree of intimacy with which this comprehensive interior understanding was cognate with historic institutions, binding even the ignorants of a culture to a great chain of meaning. These institutions are responsible for conveying the social condi- tions of their acceptance by men thus saved from destructive illusions of uniqueness and separateness. Having broken the outward forms, so as to liberate, allegedly, the inner meaning of the good, the beautiful, and the true, the spiritualizers, who set the pace of Western cultural life from just before the beginning to a short time after the end of the nineteenth century, have given way now to their logical and historical successors, the psychologizers, inheritors of that dualist tradition which pits human nature against social order.
Undeceived, as they think, about the sources of all morally binding address, the psychologizers, now fully established as the pacesetters of cultural change, propose to help men avoid doing further damage to themselves by preventing live deceptions from succeeding the dead ones. But, in order to save themselves from falling apart with their culture, men must engender an- other, different and yet powerful enough in its reorganization of experience to make themselves capable again of controlling the infinite variety of panic and emptiness to which they are dis- posed. It is to control their dis-ease as individuals that men have always acted culturally, in good faith. Books and parading, prayers and the sciences, music and piety toward parents: these are a few of the many instruments by which a culture may produce the saving larger self, for the control of panic and the
1 From its beginnings, sociological theory has argued against dualist oppositions of human nature and social order, and against individualist conceptions of the self. For a discussion of these arguments, see my two studies on the thought of Charles Horton Cooley, published as introductions to reprints of his major works, Social Organization (New York, 1962), pp. v-xx, and Human Nature and the Social Order (New York, 1964), Pp. ix-xx. Both essays are thematically related to the present volume.
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filling up of emptiness. Superior to and encompassing the differ- ent modes in which it appears, a culture must communicate ideals, setting as internalities those distinctions between right actions and wrong that unite men and permit them the funda- mental pleasure of agreement. Culture is another name for a design of motives directing the self outward, toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied.
A reorganization of those dialectical expressions of Yes and No the interplay of which constitutes culture, transforming motive into conduct, is occurring throughout the West, particu- larly in the United States and in England. It is to be expected that some instruments appropriate to our inherited organization of permissions and restraints upon action will not survive the ten- sion of fundamental reorganization. But, suppose the tension is driven deeper-so deep that all communications of ideals come under permanent and easy suspicion? The question is no longer as Dostoevski put it: "Can civilized men believe?" Rather: Can unbelieving men be civilized?
To raise again the question of nihilism, as sociologists since Auguste Comte have done, demonstrates a major change in tone: the note of apprehension has gone out of the asking. We believe that we know something our predecessors did not: that we can live freely at last, enjoying all our senses-except the sense of the past-as unremembering, honest, and friendly bar- barians all, in a technological Eden. Comte would have substi tuted a religion of humanity for its enfeebled predecessor; Max Weber proposed no substitute religion. Matthew Arnold could still listen for distant echoes of the sea of faith; Yeats knew there was a desert where once that sea might have been. To raise up faith from its stony sleep encourages the possibility of living through again the nightmare history of the last half century. Yeats did not hope for either restoration or parody of the established faiths. Rather, he prayed for a very modern sort of Second Coming, in which men would recover their innocence,
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chiefly by accepting the fact that it is self-delighting, self-appeas- ing, self-affrighting-"and that its own sweet will is Heaven's will." In our recovered innocence, to be entertained would be- come the highest good and boredom the most common evil.
The best spirits of the twentieth century have thus expressed their conviction that the original innocence, which to earlier periods was a sinful conceit, the new center, which can be held even as communities disintegrate, is the self. By this conviction a new and dynamic acceptance of disorder, in love with life and destructive of it, has been loosed upon the world. Here litera- ture and sociology converge; for the ultimate interest of soci- ology, like that of psychiatry when it is not lost in a particular patient, turns on the question whether our culture can be so reconstructed that faith-some compelling symbolic of self- integrating communal purpose-need no longer superintend the organization of personality.
So long as a culture maintains its vitality, whatever must be renounced disappears and is given back bettered; Freud called this process sublimation. But, as that sage among psychiatrists Harry Stack Sullivan once said, "if you tell people how they can sublimate, they can't sublimate." The dynamics of culture are in "the unwitting part of it." Now our renunciations have failed us; less and less is given back bettered. For this reason, chiefly, I think, this culture, which once imagined itself inside a church, feels trapped in something like a zoo of separate cages. Modern men are like Rilke's panther, forever looking out from one cage into another. Because the modern sense of identity seems out- raged by imprisonment in either old church or new cage, it is the obligation of sociologists, so far as they remain interested in assessing the quality of our corporate life, to analyze doctrinal as well as organizational profiles of the rage to be free of the in- herited morality, the better to see how these differ from what is being raged against. I shall attend to a few of the exemplarily
2 Harry Stack Sullivan, "The Illusion of Personal Individuality," Psychiatry
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enraged, and to the sense in which it may be said that they express general sentiments.
If the question "How are we to be saved?" cannot be asked in traditional ways, or need not be asked at all, then it is still the professional obligation of sociologists, who are specially inter- ested in the behavior of collectivities, to investigate the ensuing honest silence in which the communal gods have imitated the most cultivated men. And, indeed, this is the sort of investigation that sociologists have pursued ardently, from the time of Comte through that of Weber to my contemporaries.° Perhaps no
3 Alfred Weber's contributions to Kultursoziologie merit more attention be dissolving ... into something new: utter decline or the emergence of an- other historical organism."
It is helpful to have Robert K. Merton restate the established position beyond which sociology has not yet advanced: that the key concept" in sociological theory, ments of social and cultural structure." (Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, New York, 1962, p. 122.) Perhaps, in order to understand how tensions between social and cultural structures exert "pressures for change" (Merton, ibid.), it may be necessary to develop a theory of tensions within a culture. Suppose it is from the superior level of the cultural system that organizing (and disorganizing) higher principles thrust into the social structure. That thrust of higher (cultural) principles into the myriad par- ticular activities of men, enacted by cultural elites even in the most highly differentiated social structure, would then establish the modalities of societal integration and disintegration. Moreover, the study of smaller units of the social self would also take its direction from these modalities. But, further discussion would carry me too far from the immediate subject of the present volume, and too near the twin subjects of another book: on sociological theory as ineluctably normative and on the "structure" of culture. These twin subjects are merely adumbrated here.
See A. L. Kroeber and C. Kluckhohn, Culture, A Critical Review of Con- cepts and Definitions (New York, 1963), for a compendium of culture theories that repeats the deficiencies of approaches from the social sciences, while too easily dismissing important contributions from the humanities.
Freud's position on the importance of a theory of culture is well summed up in the following passages. First on the normative aspects of Freudian theory, the famous passage on the therapeutic "'intention of psychoanalysis, "tO strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id. Where id was, there ego shall be. It is à work of culture, Then, second, on the explanatory potential of a theory of culture-
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other problem than that of the changing moral configuration of modern culture has so engaged the interest of sociological theorists.
During the nineteenth century, when sociology helped in a major way to construct the central experience of deconversion toward an anti-creedal analytic attitude, that discipline suffered from a vast overconfidence both about its own advance and about the progress of the culture, which it understood as under- going varieties of such deconversions. "Progress," wrote Spencer,* "is not an accident, but a necessity. Surely must evil and immorality disappear; surely must men become perfect." A basic transformation of culture appeared both inevitable and desirable.
Running parallel with and in the opposite direction from the process of deconversion was that process of conversion to a
and on its scientific base-' -"We must not forget that the mass of human beings who are subjected to economic necessities also undergo the process of cultural development-of civilization, as other people may say-which, though no doubt influenced by all the other factors, is certainly independent of them in its origin, being comparable to an organic process and very well able on its part to exercise an influence on the other factors. It displaces instinctual aims and brings it about that people become antagonistic to what they had previously tolerated. Moreover, the progressive strengthening of the scientific spirit seems to form an essential part of it. If anyone were in a position to show in detail the way in which these different factors-the general inherited human disposi- tion, its racial variations and its cultural transformations-inhibit and promote one another under the conditions of social rank, profession and earning capacity-if anyone were able to do this, he would have supplemented Marxism James Strachey (London, 1964), pp. 80 and 179. Note Freud's vacillation be- tween a reductionist (to the psychological level) theory of culture and one in which culture is a phenomenon sui generis. This vacillation he never
faith, but not about its inevitability of eventual terminus. (See the note he added to the passage quoted.)
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superior system of symbols-Science- which would supply the next predicate for the cultural organization of personality. Comte, for example, understood his own time as one of transi- ton between two cultures. It was more generally proposed by students of our collective condition not merely that the old religious culture was dying but that the new scientific one had quite enough power already to be born. Thus Comte con- cluded that only because of the "coexistence" of these two cultures did the "grand crisis now experienced by the most civilized nations" persist.® Freud was less sanguine. He believed that the crisis of coexistence was probably a permanent mode of the relation between personality and culture.
I question whether the "grand crisis," our deeper trouble, can be attributed to "'coexistence," as major figures among the nineteenth-century intellectuals, culminating in Freud, insisted. It is less the lingering of the old culture than the emergence of the new that needs diagnosis. In fact, evil and immorality are disappearing, as Spencer assumed they would, mainly because our culture is changing its definition of human perfection. No longer the Saint, but the instinctual Everyman, twisting his neck uncomfortably inside the starched collar of culture, is the com- munal ideal, to whom men offer tacit prayers for deliverance from their inherited renunciations. Freud sought only to soften the collar; others, using bits and pieces of his genius, would like to take it off. There have been forerunners of this movement- Rousseau, Boehme, Hamann, or Blake. But never before has there been such a general shifting of sides as now among intellectuals in the United States and England. Many have gone over to the enemy without realizing that they, self-considered the cultural elite, have actually become spokesmen for what Freud called the
5 culture even more scientific in its substantial nature and social organization than, thatsea vigagede, by p comtei
6 the Scientific Operations Necessary for Re- 6 Auguste Comte, organizing Society," Frederick Harrison (ed.), Early Essays of Comte (London, n.d.) p. 88.
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instinctual "mass." Much of modern literature constitutes a symbolic act of going over to the side of the latest, and most original, individualist." This represents the complete democrati. zation of our culture.
It was in order to combat just such talented hostility to culture that Freud emphasized coercion and the renunciation of instinct as indispensable elements in all culture. Freud was neither an eroticist nor a democrat. His theory of culture de- pended upon a crossing between his idea of moral authority and an elitist inclination. "It is just as impossible," he writes, "to do without control of the mass by a minority as it is to dispense with coercion in the work of civilization." By "'mass" Freud means not merely the "lazy and unintelligent," but, more impor- tantly, those who "have no love for instinctual renunciation" and who cannot be "'convinced by argument of its inevitability." That such large numbers of the cultivated and intelligent have identified themselves deliberately with those who are supposed to have no love for instinctual renunciation, suggests to me the most elaborate act of suicide that Western intellectuals have ever staged-those intellectuals, whether of the left or right, whose historic function it has been to assert the authority of a culture organized in terms of communal purpose, through the agency of congregations of the faithful.
7 But not all modern literature, of course. There remains a strong mood of dejection at the passing of the old culture, that mood memorably expressed by Rose Macaulay, in her novel, Potterism (London, 1920). "It was a curious immense seriousness. Those of us who can remember it should do so, for it will not return. It has given place to the age of melodrama, when nothing is too strange to happen, and no one is ever surprised. That, too, may pass, but probably not, for it is primeval. The other was artificial, a mere product of civilisation, and could not last." But Rose Macaulay was mistaken. Her nostalgia was itself a Potterism, a snobbish and mean dislike of the fact that the modern religion of art that annoys old catholics, such as Miss Macaulay and Bernard Berenson, not the religion itself. (Cf. Footnote I, Chap. 8, Pp. 232- 233.)
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Of course, this suicide is intended only as an exciting pose. Renunciations of instinct, as Freud wrote, "necessarily must remain." For these renunciations, the individual must be com- pensated by pleasures at once higher and more realizable than the pleasure of instinctual gratification. In compensation, and in place of where faith once was, men are offered Art and/or Science. It is true that new religions are constantly being born. But modern culture is unique in having given birth to such elaborately argued anti-religions, all aiming to confirm us in our devastating illusions of individuality and freedom. I suspect the children of Israel did not spend much time elaborating a doctrine of the golden calf; they naïvely danced around it, until Moses, their first intellectual, put a stop to the plain fun and insisted on civilizing them, by submerging their individualities within a communal purpose. Now, although there is some dancing again, the intellectuals mainly sit around and think in awe about the power and perversity of their instincts, disguising their rancor- ous worship of self in the religion of art. Confronted thus with a picture gallery as the new center of self-worship, civilized men must become again anti-art, in the hope of shifting attention toward modalities of worship wholly other than that of self.
In my chapters on Reich and Lawrence, I shall represent some ways in which art and science have come to serve the con- temporary aversion to culture. This aversion has grown less naive, more doctrinal, and therefore more dangerous. For these are doctrines of psychological man-the latest, and perhaps the supreme, individualist-opposed in depth to earlier modes of self- salvation: through identification with communal purpose. Jung is the most interesting case. As a cultural conservative, his psychology is para-religious, striving as it does to re-establish various corporate identities and communal purposes as purely therapeutic devices. In contrast to the conservative Jung, Reich and Lawrence are moral revolutionaries in a more straightfor- ward way: neither proposes to defend common purposes which once persisted through the individualization of those energies
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called "conscience, 9? generated for the saving of selves precisely by means of a communal purpose.
The debts incurred by conscience through warped and atro- phied communal purposes are now being paid off at a usurious rate of interest. The lingering death of authoritarian love has left behind hatred and violence, twin widows of dead love, free to stimulate in the culturally impoverished or disenchanted ener- gies emancipated from conviction. It is not class or race war that we have to fear so much as deadly violence between the culture classes. But the upper culture classes have already lost this most fundamental of all class struggles by their admiration for the "vitality of the lower, that vitality being a mirror image of their own earlier dynamism. A social structure shakes with violence and shivers with fears of violence not merely when that structure is callously unjust, but also when its members must stimulate themselves to feverish activity in order to demonstrate how alive they are. That there are colonies of the violent among us, devoid of any stable sense of communal purpose, best de- scribes, I think, our present temporarily schizoid existence in two cultures~-vacillating between dead purposes and deadly de- vices to escape boredom.
A full transition to a post-communal culture may never be achieved. It is a persuasive argument, still, that maintains there are safeguards, built into both human nature and culture, limit- ing the freedom of men to atomize themselves. Perhaps human nature will revolt, producing yet another version of second nature with which to fend off and curb the vitality of the present assault upon the moralizing functions of our past. Every culture must establish itself as a system of moralizing demands, images that mark the trail of each man's memory; thus to distinguish right actions from wrong the inner ordinances are set, by which men are guided in their conduct so as to assure a mutual security of contact. Culture is, indeed, the higher learn- ing. But, this higher learning is not acquired at universities; rather, it is assimilated continuously from earliest infancy when
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human beings first begin to trust in those familiar responses others make to their overtures. In every culture, there stands a censor, governing the opportunity of recognizing and respond- ing to novel stimuli. That governor, inclined always to be censorious about novelty, we may call "faith." Faith is the compulsive dynamic of culture, channeling obedience to, trust in, and dependence upon authority. With more or less consid- ered passion, men submit to the moral demand system-and, moreover, to its personifications, from which they cannot detach themselves except at the terrible cost of guilt that such figures of authority exact from those not yet so indifferent that they have ceased troubling to deny them.
Now, contradicting all faiths, a culture of the indifferent is being attempted, lately using a rhetoric of "commitment" with which to enlarge the scope of its dynamism. Such a credo of Change amounts to a new faith-more precisely, to a counter- faith. This counter-faith intimates the next culture; for faith, or its negative, is always and everywhere the generating and cor- rupting agent of culture. This is not to say that contemporary culture is corrupt; what appears to some as corruption indicates the generation of yet another culture, for none is immortal. While disassociating itself from the high costs of old doctrinal seriousness and lonely lives, the emergent culture nevertheless produces books and music, art and science, an endless ambiance of fun and boredom-everything in fact, including moral passion and communal purpose, as varieties of an antitypal therapy of self. To call corrupt a culture purchased at lower cost to our nerves, and at larger magnitudes of self-fulfillment, would show a lamentable lack of imagination. The look of the future need not be blank and pitiless. Intelligence may work more efficiently, after all, than compassionate solidarity. Counter-transference may succeed where less calculated loves have failed. If the religious imagination is purblind, and its obstinate visionaries take risks resulting in such personifications of the Parousia as Yeats saw slouching toward Bethlehem, then we will have to
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make our way to a more pleasant city, using our secular vision of comforts that render all salvations obsolete.
I, too, aspire to see clearly, like a rifleman, with one eye shut; I, too, aspire to think without assent. This is the ultimate violence to which the modern intellectual is committed. Since things have become as they are, I, too, share the modern desire not to be deceived. The culture to which I was first habituated grows progressively different in its symbolic nature and in its lite likelihood of a great rebirth of the old corporate ideals. The proletariat" was the most recent notable corporate identity, the latest failed god. By this time men may have gone too far, beyond the old deception of good and evil, to specialize at last, wittingly, in techniques that are to be called, in the present volume, "therapeutic," with nothing at stake beyond a manipu- latable sense of well-being. This is the unreligion of the age, and its master science. What the ignorant have always felt, the knowing now know, after millennial distractions by stratagems that did not heighten the more immediate pleasures. The syste- matic hunting down of all settled convictions represents the anti-cultural predicate upon which modern personality is being reorganized, now not in the West only but, more slowly, in the non-West. The Orient and Africa are thus being acculturated in a dynamism that has already grown substantial enough to torment its progenitors with nightmares of revenge for having so un- settled the world. It is a terrible error to see the West as conservative and the East as revolutionary. We are the true revolutionaries. The East is swiftly learning to act as we do,
8 Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter" makes an immediate pendant to "The Second Cominfave walked and prayed for this young child. Considering that, all hatred driven hence, The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will.
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which is anti-conservative in a way non-Western peoples have only recently begun fully to realize for themselves.
In the regular acting out of mandatory therapies of commit- ment® built into the charter of his society, man, as a creation of affectionate and censorious authority, once organized for him- self modes of willing obedience, or faith, in which he found his sense of well-being and, also, his freedom from that singular criterion. Culture without cultus appears, in almost all historical cases, a contradiction in terms. Within the mechanisms of cult, culture was organized, consisting mainly of ritual efforts to elicit and produce stable responses of assurance to more or less fixed wants--fleshly and spiritual, as it used to be said. There was, then, a standard range of expectations from which reassurance was elicited, even though the responses of the eliciting agencies, rendered "sacred" by their supreme function of organizing a life worth living, might at any moment offer admonitions rather than consolations to the seeker. Thus the sacred socializing agencies composed a moral order.
9 but proclaim, at times, the cultural necessity of such systems: "In contrast decree, by some system of morals, that all kinds of tyranny and unreasonable- ness are unlawful. What is essential and invaluable in every system of morals, is that it is a long constraint. In order to understand Stoicism, or Port-Royal, or Puritanism, one should remember the constraint under which every language has attained to strength and freedom. ... How much trouble have the poets and orators of every nation given themselves... . [to be free] 'from submission to arbitrary laws, as the anarchists say, and thereby fancy themselves free,;' even free-spirited. The singular fact remains, however, that everything of the nature of freedom, elegance, boldness, dance, and masterly certainty, which exists or has existed, whether it be in thought itself or in seriousness, it is not at all improbable that precisely this is 'nature' and 'natural' and not laisser-aller! . . . The essential thing in heaven and earth' is parent)y (to repeat it once more) that there should be long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run,
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One main clue to the understanding of social organization is to be found in its symbolic of communal purpose; this, in turn, operates through a social system enacting that symbolic in a way at once admonitory and consoling. Each culture is its own order of therapy--a system of moralizing demands, including remis- sions that ease the pressures of communal purposes. Therapeutic elites before our own were predominately supportive rather than critical of culture as a moral demand system. Admonitions were the expectable predicates of consolations; that is what is meant, nowadays, by "guilt" culture. Whenever therapeutic elites grow predominately critical then a cultural revolution may be said to be in progress. Ours is such a time. The Occident has long been such a place.
Until the present culture rose to threaten its predecessor, our demand system could be specified by the kind of creedal hedges it raised around impulses of independence or autonomy from communal purpose. In the culture preceding our own, the order of therapy was embedded in a consensus of "shalt nots." The best never lacked binding convictions, for they were the most bound, mainly by what they should not do-or even think, or dream. "Thou shalt" ' precipitated a sequence of operative "'shalt nots." Cultic therapies of commitment never mounted a search for some new opening into experience; on the contrary, new experience was not wanted. Cultic therapy domesticated the wildness of experience. By treating some novel stimulus or ambiguity of experience in this manner, the apparently new was integrated into a restrictive and collective identity. Cultic thera- pies consisted, therefore, chiefly in participation mystiques se- verely limiting deviant initiatives. Individuals were trained, through ritual action, to express fixed wants, although they could not count thereby upon commensurate gratifications. The limitation of possibilities was the very design of salvation.
To the ironic question "And, being saved, how are we to behave?" Western culture long returned a painfully simple answer: "Behave like your Savior." Christian culture, like other
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organizations of moral demand, operated, however imperfectly, through the internalization of a soteriological character ideal carrying tremendous potentials for fresh intakes of communal energy; the highest level of controls and remissions (which together organized systems of moral demands) experienced an historical and individualized incarnation. Such euhemerist proc- esses may have been indispensable to the vitality of the old culture. To adjust the expression of impulses to the controlling paragon, or character ideal, defines the primary process in the shaping of our inherited culture; the arts and sciences define the secondary process, in which exemplary modes of action are extended further, into a central moralizing experience, thus transforming individual into institutional action.
In the classical Christian culture of commitment, one renunci atory mode of control referred to the sexual opportunism of individuals. Contemporary churchmen may twist and turn it while they try to make themselves heard in a culture that renders preaching superfluous: the fact remains that renuncia- tory controls of sexual opportunity were placed in the Christian culture very near the center of the symbolic that has not held. Current apologetic efforts by religious professionals, in pretend- ing that renunciation as the general mode of control was never dominant in the system, reflect the strange mixture of cowardice and courage with which they are participating in the dissolution of their cultural functions. Older Christian scholarship has known better than new Christian apologetics.
At bottom, only a single point was dealt with, abstinence from sexual relationships; everything else was secondary: for he who had renounced these found nothing hard. Renunciation of the servile yoke of sin (servile peccati iugum discutere) was the watchword of Christians, and an extraordinary una- nimity prevailed as to the meaning of this watchword, whether we turn to the Coptic porter, or the learned Greek teacher, to
10
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the Bishop of Hippo, or Jerome the Roman presbyter, or the biographer of Saint Martin. Virginity was the specifically Christian virtue, and the essence of all virtues; in this conviction the meaning of the evangelical law was summed up.
Historically, the rejection of sexual individualism (which di- vorces pleasure and procreation) was the consensual matrix of Christian culture. It was never the last line drawn. On the lenging those rapidly fluctuating imperatives established in Rome's remissive culture, from which a new order of depriva- tions was intended to release the faithful Christian believer. Every controlling symbolic contains such remissive functions. What is revolutionary in modern culture refers to releases from inherited doctrines of therapeutic deprivation; from a predicate of renunciatory control, enjoining releases from impulse need, our culture has shifted toward a predicate of impulse release, projecting controls unsteadily based upon an infinite variety of wants raised to the status of needs. Difficult as the modern cultural condition may be, I doubt that Western men can be persuaded again to the Greek opinion that the secret of happi- ness is to have as few needs as possible. The philosophers of therapeutic deprivation are disposed to eat well when they are not preaching. It is hard to take Schopenhauer at his ascetic word when we know what splendid dinners he had put on, day after day, at the Hotel Schwan in Frankfort.
The central Christian symbolic was not ascetic in a crude
11 Adolf von Harnack, History of Dogma, English translation (London, 1894-99), III, p. 128.
12 Genius strives to dramatize and clarify the symbolic which is its predicate. Augustine tried to formulate the Christian symbolic in a motif of polarized Christian tradition. "Two loves hui bite it* her verify alt* *rad eon got, Sad, arised unto the contempt of self
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renunciatory mode which would destroy any culture. Max Scheler described that culture accurately, I think, when he concluded that "Christian asceticism-at least so far as it was not influenced by decadent Hellenistic philosophy-had as its pur- pose not the suppression or even extirpation of natural drives, but rather their control and complete spiritualization. It is posi- tive, not negative, asceticism-aimed fundamentally at a libera- tion of the highest powers of personality from blockage by the automatism of the lower drives. "13 That renunciatory mode, in which the highest powers of personality are precisely those which subserve rather than subvert culture, appears no longer systemically efficient. The spiritualizers have had their day; nowadays, the best among them appear engaged in a desperate strategy of acceptance, in the hope that by embracing doctrinal expressions of therapeutic aims they will be embraced by the therapeutics; a false hope-the therapeutics need no doctrines, only opportunities. But the spiritualizers persist in trying to maintain cultural contact with constituencies already decon- verted in all but name. Even the Roman Catholic clergy must now confront their own constituencies, as their Protestant and Jewish colleagues have had to do long before. Nevertheless, the religious professionals have reason to hope for survival, precisely because they have come to be aware of their situation and are seeking ways to alter it, in the direction of a fresh access of communal purpose, centered in the Negro protest movement, or in some other movement of protest against the effects of that very dead culture which they think, by protesting so belatedly, to survive.
The death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly com- pelling, first of all to the cultural elites themselves. Many spokes- men for our established normative institutions are aware of their failure and yet remain powerless to generate in themselves the
13 Max Scheler, Vom Umsturz der Werte (Bern, 1955), p. 114. (Author's translation.)
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necessary unwitting part of their culture that merits the name of faith. us not the very fact that so wretchedly little binding address is heard in the church, asked Karl Barth, rhetorically, in 1939, "accountable for a goodly share of her misery-is it not perhaps the misery?"* The misery of this culture is acutely stated by the special misery of its normative institutions. Our more general misery is that, having broken with those institu- tionalized credibilities from which its moral energy derived, new credibilities are not yet operationally effective and, perhaps, cannot become so in a culture constantly probing its own unwitting part.
It may be argued against this position that Western culture was never deeply believing-at least not in the Christian manner which, in a number of its most persuasive varieties, encouraged the seeking after individual salvations at the expense of a collec- tive one. Even so, Christian culture survived because it superin- tended the organization of Western personality in ways that produced the necessary corporate identities, serving a larger communal purpose institutionalized in the churches themselves. Ernst Troeltsch was correct in his institutional title for the moral demand system preceding the one now emerging out of its complete ruin: a "church civilization, 99 an "authoritarian and coercive culture." What binding address now describes our successor culture? In what does the self now try to find salva- tion, if not in the breaking of corporate identities and in an acute suspicion of all normative institutions?
Western culture has had a literary canon, through which its character ideals were conveyed. What canons will replace the scriptural? None, I suppose. We are probably witnessing the end of a cultural history dominated by book religions and word- makers. The elites of the emergent culture-if they do not destroy themselves and all culture with a dynamism they appear unable to control-are being trained in terminologies that have
14 Karl Barth, The Church and the Political Problem of Our Day (New York, 1939), PP. 82-3.
[20]
only the most tenuous relation to any historic culture or its incorporativeself-interpretations.
It needs to be noted that in particular on the geographic margins of our moral demand system, and in the Örient, the rejection of religious culture, even in principle, is far from complete. By contrast, the Communist movement may be viewed as culturally conservative, belonging to the classical tradition of moral demand systems. The revolution in the West is profoundly cultural whereas that in the East, withal its defen- sive doctrine of the cultural as a mere superstructure of the techno-political class system, has been less certainly so. Of the two, our revolution is, I think, the more profound one. Com- munist culture, no less than the Christian, is in trouble; it cannot stave off a revolution coming out of the West, in part as a reper- cussion, in that it renounces the renunciatory mode of Com- munism. The Russian cultural revolution is already being signaled by the liberation, however grudgingly, of the intellectuals from creedal constraints.
The new religiosity is remissive. It represents no mere literary challenge, as in the time of the Enlightenment. The would-be instinctual Everyman and his girl friend are the enlightened ones
15 Communism, both doctrinally and institutionally, is here taken in its Russian society. It is impossible to conceive of a vital Christian culture without a teaching Church. As the inheritor of the churches' ambition, the Communist Party has sought to function as a normative institution, unlike Western politi- cal parties.
In documenting his assertion that Lenin's elder brother, Alexander (Sasha). was a Marxist, Louis Fischer has unwittingly helped demonstrate the validity of analyzing Communist movements as primarily cultural-however strenuously and systematically Marxist theory itself contradicts the proposition, and persists in turning the truth upside down. Fischer quotes from Sasha's trial, when the elder brother proclaimed that is a result of a change in the consciousness of society. "every change in the social system The original Marxist "'utopianism" and moralism of Moses Hess and other early Communist theorists, have long drawn their implicit knowledge, of what revolutions really are, See Louis Fischer, The Life of Lenin (New York, 1964), p. 15.
[21]
now; a Freud would be quite superfluous, specially in view of the fact that he sought to find ways other than neurotic of supporting renunciations.
Indeed, Freud has already receded into history. His problems are not ours. The psychoanalytic movement, no less than its rationalist predecessors, has been ruined by the popular (and commercial) pressure upon it to help produce a symbolic for the reorganization of personality, after the central experience of deconversion, of which Freud was the last great theorist, had been completed. Fixed as they are at the historical stage of deconversion, responsible psychotherapists continue to struggle confusedly to discover their own proper attitude toward renun- ciatory moral demand systems even as the normative character of their abandonment has altered both the theoretical and work- ing conditions of clinical practice. So confused, psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, in their hospitals and consulting rooms, stand almost as helpless as their functional predecessors and sometime cultural opponents, the clergy. But other therapeutic elites are not in a better condition, as I have tried to bring out more elaborately in the final chapter.
Our cultural revolution does not aim, like its predecessors, at victory for some rival commitment, but rather at a way of using all commitments, which amounts to loyalty toward none. By psychologizing about themselves interminably, Western men are learning to use their internality against the primacy of any particular organization of personality. If this re-structuring of the Western imagination succeeds in establishing itself, complete with institutional regimens, then human autonomy from the compulsions of culture may follow the freedoms already won from the compulsions of nature. With such a victory, culture, as previously understood, need suffer no further defeats. It is conceivable that millennial distinctions between inner and outer experience, private and public life, will become trivial. The individual heart need have no reasons of its own that the corpo-
[22]
rate head cannot understand and exploit for some augmentation of the individual's sense of well-being. Thinking need not pro- duce nausea or despair as its final answer to the assessment of communal purpose because men will have ceased to seek any salvation other than amplitude in living itself. Faith can then grow respectable again, as one entertainable and passing personal experience among others, to enhance the interest of living freed from communal purpose. The significance Marx attached to the division of labor for the organization of society may have bearing in our emergent culture on the variety of entertain- ments. To paraphrase Marx and Engels, all morality, be it ascetic or hedonistic, loses its force with a therapeutic outlook.
Like its predecessors, the emergent culture must formulate its own controls, no less than the preceding one defined its own remissions; it is in the process of doing so already. We are, I fear, getting to know one another. Reticence, secrecy, concealment of self have been transformed into social problems; once they were aspects of civility, when the great Western formulary summed up in the creedal phrase "Know thyself" encouraged obedience to communal purposes rather than suspicion of them. Self-knowledge again made social is the principle of control upon which the emergent culture may yet be able to make itself stable. Indeed, with the arts of psychiatric management en- hanced and perfected, men will come to know one another in ways that could facilitate total socialization without a symbolic of communal purpose. Then the brief historic fling of the individual, celebrating himself as a being in himself, divine and therefore essentially unknowable, would be truly ended-ending no less certainly than the preceding personifications of various renunciatory disciplines. Men already feel freer to live their lives with a minimum of pretense to anything more grand than sweetening the time. Perhaps it is better so; in cultures past, men sacrificed themselves to heroic and cruel deceptions, and suffered for glories that once mirrored their miseries. Not until psycho- logical men overcome lives of squalor can they truly test their assumption that the inherited ideals of glory are no longer
[23]
required. Affluence achieved, the creation of a knowing rather than a believing person, able to enjoy life without erecting high symbolic hedges around it, distinguishes the emergent culture from its predecessor. The new anti-culture aims merely at an eternal interim ethic of release from the inherited controls.
Who is to say that these controls are eternal? I do not think so; even Christian theologians no longer say so with any confi- dence-and some are saying, rather, that new releases are holier than old controls. Yet even among churchmen there are those who understand anew that their religion is nothing if not the organization of communal purpose and the conservation of inherited culture; they therefore place desperate hope in the movement of which Dr. Martin Luther King is chief spokesman. Increasing numbers of churchmen have allied themselves with the Negro religious leader in what they have reluctantly under- stood must be a common struggle, for the rebirth of their moral demand system, against vastly superior numbers of nominally Christian (or Jewish) barbarians. This slowly reforming Chris- tian cultural elite, apparent fellow travelers of the movement of Negro non-violent protest but in reality its critical aggregate, may yet save the United States from a barbarism long evident in the conduct of their own churches' members, in ordinary Amer- ican commercial activity, and in the extraordinary incivilities of the American social manner. Yet there may be little power of Christian renewal in the movement of Negro protest. For the American Negro has been a focus for releasing images in the dominant white culture. Affluent white society, as it grows more affluent, may draw nearer their idea of the Negro as a model enjoyer of the relaxed life, but that idea is profoundly prejudicial to the renewal sought by the religious leadership, black and white.16
16 Compare the white idea of the Negro with their idea of the Jews, who, throughout Western cultural history, have been feared and hated as personifications of controlling motifs. In the light of their personifications in terms of releasing motifs, American Negroes are stuck with a double-edged motto: "Freedom Now" aptly expresses the nervousness and furtive envy of white American ideas about Negro behavior.
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The present releases, in growing more dominant, must achieve institutional affirmations of the prevalent feeling. Critically to elaborate such affirmations has been the historic function of Western intellectuals. But, not yet able to produce imagery that would mark a trail for many memories, contemporary writers and artists, all those intellectuals slightly ahead of their time, mainly produce moods of solicitude about themselves, as if they could not bear the weight of the freedom from their inherited role upon which they themselves insist. This temper against moralizing has its justifications. The Germans recently manipu- lated all corporate identities and communal purposes with a thoroughness against which the analytic attitude may be our surest protection.
Under such protection, it may not be possible to organize our culture again as an unwitting dynamic of moral demands claim- ing the prerogatives of truth, exercised through creedally au- thoritative institutions. Where family and nation once stood, or Church and Party, there will be hospital and theater too," the normative institutions of the next culture. Trained to be inca- pable of sustaining sectarian satisfactions, psychological man cannot be susceptible to sectarian control. Religious man was
17 In a passage of his Italienische Reise, (Stuttgart, 1862) dated May 27, 1787, Goethe remarks: in the long run; I am only afraid that at the same time the world will have turned into one huge hospital where everyone is everybody else's humane nurse." See the translation by W. H. Auden and E. Mayer (New York, 1962) p. 312. This is the earliest prophecy of the emergent culture of which I am aware. But Goethe was not the last member of a cultural elite to dread or wish for such an institutional development. Coleridge once suggested, in a letter, the founding of a "new charitable institution. . for Tunacy and idiocy of the will, in which, with the full consent of, or at the direct insistence of the patient himself, and with the concurrence of his friends, such a person under the certificate of a physician might be placed under medical and moral coercion. I am convinced that London would furnish a hundred volunteers in as many days from the gin-shops, who would swallow their glass of poison in order to get courage to present themselves to the hospital in question. And a similar institution might exist for a higher class of will-maniacs or impotents. Had such a house of health been in existence, I know who would have entered himself as a patient some five and twenty years ago." Letters, II, pp. 767-8. Quoted in Kathleen Coburn (ed.), Inquiring Spirit: Coleridge from his Pub- lished and Unpublished Prose Writings (New York, 1951), Pp. 36 fF.
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born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased. The difference was established long ago, when "I believe, " the cry of the ascetic, lost precedencel8 to "'one feels," the caveat of the therapeutic. And if the therapeutic is to win out, then surely the psychotherapist will be his secular spiritual guide.
However one may judge the validity of the multiple truths at which science and history arrive, my interest is in their social viability. The next culture may be viable without being valid; on the other hand, the old faiths could be judged valid even by those who consider them now no longer viable. In order to attend fairly to the competing beliefs and unbeliefs, one must struggle to use neutral terms. A sociological vocabulary keeps a certain distance from both new permissions and old inhibitions. This distance is the only possible justification for such jargon as I have used in the present volume; except as a device for gaining perspective, sociological jargon is a curse, first of all upon the intellectual lives of sociologists. Sociological writing itself is ineluctably part of the psychohistorical process, engaged as it is in persuasive redefinitions of action that alter the action.
Can the present releases become the predicates of new con- trols? Viewed traditionally, the continuing shift from a control- ling to a releasing symbolic may appear as the dissolution of culture. Viewed sociologically, the dominance of releasing motifs, in which the releasers themselves evolve as new modes of control, with patterns of consumption as our popular discipline, implies a movement of Western culture away from its former configuration, toward one in which old ideological contents are preserved mainly for their therapeutic potential, as interesting deposits of past motifs of moralizing. No imperative can then develop a monopoly on sentiment, because none will be backed by a deeply ingrained system of inner ordinances.
18 For example, it is evident in the apologetics preached by Friedrich Schleiermacher to the cultured despisers of religion at the end of the eighteenth century; Schleiermacher's Reden (1799) were a brilliant effort to turn the deconversion experience of the highly cultured against itself.
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I do not refer to a "sensualist" culture but to one that prepares for adaptability in matters of the "spirit." There is no special affection reserved in this volume for the superiority usually claimed for "spiritual" over 'sensual" concerns. In the emergent culture, a wider range of people will have "spiritual" concerns and engage in "spiritual" pursuits. There will be more singing and more listening. People will continue to genuflect and read the Bible, which has long achieved the status of great literature; but no prophet will denounce the rich attire or stop the dancing. There will be more theater, not less, and no Puritan will denounce the stage and draw its curtains. On the contrary, I expect that modern society will mount psychodramas far more frequently than its ancestors mounted miracle plays, with pa- tient-analysts acting out their inner lives, after which they could extemporize the final act as interpretation. We shall even institu- tionalize in the hospital-theater the Verfremdungseffekt, with the therapeutic triumphantly enacting his own discovered will.
The wisdom of the next social order, as I imagine it, would not reside in right doctrine, administered by the right men, who must be found, but rather in doctrines amounting to permission for each man to live an experimental life. Thus, once again, culture will give back what it has taken away. All governments will be just, so long as they secure that consoling plenitude of option in which modern satisfaction really consists. In this way the emergent culture could drive the value problem clean out of the social system and, limiting it to a form of philosophical entertainment in lieu of edifying preachment, could successfully conclude the exercise for which politics is the name. Problems of democracy need no longer prove so difficult as they have been. Psychological man is likely to be indifferent to the ancient question of legitimate authority, of sharing in government, so long as the powers that be preserve social order and manage an economy of abundance. The danger of politics lies more in the ancient straining to create those symbols or support those insti- tutions that narrow the range of virtues or too narrowly define
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the sense of well-being; for the latter seems to be the real beatitude toward which men have always strained. Psychologi cal man, in his independence from all gods, can feel free to use all god-terms; I imagine he will be a hedger against his own bets, a user of any faith that lends itself to therapeutic use.
Culture as therapy becomes realizable in part because of the increasing automaticity of the productive system. But without the discipline of work, a vast re-ritualization of social life will probably occur, to contain aggression in a steady state and maintain necessary levels of attention to activity. The rules of health indicate activity; psychological man can exploit older cultural precepts, ritual struggle no less than play therapy, in order to maintain the dynamism of his culture. Of course, the newest Adam cannot be expected to limit himself to the use of old constraints. If "immoral" materials, rejected under earlier cultural criteria, are therapeutically effective, enhancing some- body's sense of well-being, then they are useful. The "'end" or "'goal" is to keep going. Americans, as F. Scott Fitzgerald concluded, believe in the green light.
I am aware that these speculations may be thought to contain some parodies of an apocalypse. But what apocalypse has ever been so kindly? What culture has ever attempted to see to it that no ego is hurt? Perhaps the elimination of the tragic sense-which is tantamount to the elimination of irreconcilable moral principles is no tragedy. Civilization could be, for the first time in history, the expression of human contents rather than the con- solatory control of discontents. Then and only then would the religious question receive a markedly different answer from those dominant until recently in our cultural history.
[29]CHAPTER I
The Analytic Attitude: Freud's Legacy
and Its Inheritors
Consolation . . . at bottom this is what they are demanding . the wildest revolutionaries no less passionately than the most virtuous believers. -Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents
The religious question: How are we to be consoled for the misery of living? may be answered by a culture, thus self- defined, in various ways; in terms of the good, the beautiful, and the true (the wordiness of Socrates); by a reference to how and by whom we are to be saved (the terseness of Christ); by tracing a line of historical development toward justice (the ponderous irony of Marx). Because Freud as a therapist refused even to ask the religious question, or proclaim a characterologi- cal ideal, he earned the polemical hatred of the best who came after him-Jung, for example, as well as Lawrence and Reich- all of whom tried to envision the next culture. The prophet in all three of Freud's most powerful successor-critics was much stronger than the scientist. Jung could not avoid finding a theology at the end of his therapy nor Reich an ideal character at the end of his analytic theory. Later on in this volume, I shall
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consider various struggles by Freud's successors to frame the great question in a culturally compelling way, illustrating thereby how powerfully psychotherapy may be tempted to go beyond the grim safety of diagnostic analysis to seek out the danger of creative doctrinal synthesis. All the post-Freudians treated in this volume were similarly tempted. Their psycholo- gies became modes of consolation. Instead of raising Freud's lack of conviction into a doctrine, leaving the ruins of the old renunciatory culture by the wayside, mitigating merely its dis- comforts as was done by Freud, these post-Freudians tried to create a releasing conviction-a new culture, or, as in the case of Jung, a simulacrum of the old one.
Freud never felt tempted in this way. His genius was analytic, not prophetic. At its best, psychoanalytic therapy is devoted to the long and dubious task of rubbing a touch of that analytic genius into less powerful minds. Here is no large new cosset of an idea, within which Western men could comfort themselves for the inherent difficulties of living. Freud's was a severe and chill anti-doctrine, in which the awesome dichotomy with which culture imposes itself upon men-that between an ultimately meaningful and a meaningless life-must also be abandoned. This, then, was Freud's prescription to mankind as the patient, so that by the power of the analytic attitude a limit be set to the sway of culture over mankind.
With such an attitude, men could not change the dynamics of culture (which were unchangeable anyway),' but they could change at least their own relationship to these dynamics. They could become more diplomatic in their transactions with the moral demand system: not rebels but negotiators. To maintain the analytic attitude, in the everyday conduct of life, becomes the most subtle of all efforts of the ego; it is tantamount to
1 "What would be the use of the most correct analysis of social neuroses, since no one possesses authority to impose such a therapy upon the group?" To change the dynamics of culture, the analytic attitude would have to become a moral demand, and thus it would cease to be analytic. Cf. Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, Standard Edition (London, 1961), XXI, p. 144-
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limiting the power of the super-ego and, therewith, of culture. The analytic attitude expresses a trained capacity for entertain- ing tentative opinions about the inner dictates of conscience, reserving the right even to disobey the law insofar as it origi- nates outside the individual, in the name of a gospel of a freer impulse. Not that impulse alone is to be trusted. It is merely to be respected, and a limit recognized of the ability of any culture to transform the aggressiveness of impulse, by an alchemy of commitment, into the authority of law. Freud maintained a sober vision of man in the middle, a go-between, aware of the fact that he had little strength of his own, forever mediating between culture and instinct in an effort to gain some room for maneuver between these hostile powers. Maturity, according to Freud, lay in the trained capacity to keep the negotiations from breaking down.
Does not such a doctrine of maturity, which cannot lead beyond the difficult and unstable condition of being mature, lead instead to fresh outbursts of hope for the victory of culture or that of impulse-or, as in the case of Freud's critical successors, to the wild hope of a culture dominated by impulse? Freud's doctrine of psychological manhood has itself contributed to a resurgence of anxiety on both sides, with some accusing him of being a conservative of culture (e.g., Lawrence) and others accusing him of being a nineteenth-century radical of impulse (e.g., Jung). In time, it may become apparent that Freud and his doctrine have undergone an inexorable disciplining by the culture, and that the exemplary cast of Freud's mind and character is more enduring than the particulars of his doctrine. In culture it is always the example that survives; the person is the immortal idea. Psychoanalysis was the perfect vehicle for Freud's intel- lectual character. When, at last, Freud found himself, having searched systematically but in vain in various disciplines, he established a new discipline, first of all for himself.
Later, as psychoanalysis became more adaptable, the hidden force of Freud's character began to be effective through the
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discipline, detached from his person. Psychoanalysis became a transferable art, and therefore a cultural force, which, dealing as it does in moral suasion, does not distinguish between science and art.? In sociological terms, psychoanalysis became what we shall call the symbolic mode of a "negative community." It is held together by the analytic attitude, as most moderns are who think too much about themselves. Psychoanalysis is yet another method of learning how to endure the loneliness produced by culture. Psychoanalysis is its representative therapy-in contrast to classical therapies of commitment. It is characteristic of our culture that there is no longer an effective sense of communion, driving the individual out of himself, rendering the inner life serviceable to the outer. This has led to cultural artifacts like psychoanalysis, devised primarily to protect the outer life against further encroachments by the inner and to minimize the damage caused by disorders among the parts inside. When so little can be taken for granted, and when the meaningfulness of social existence no longer grants an inner life at peace with itself, every man must become something of a genius about himself. But the imagination boggles at a culture made up mainly of virtuosi of the self. It is precisely the authority of culture that limits the need for such virtuosi.
Just this threat to the authority of culture is the reason why psychoanalysis appealed so immediately to the modern intellec- tual, who prides himself first of all on his independence of mind and conduct. Now, there is a curious resemblance between the futility felt by the analyst and the modern intellectual: both have the analytic attitude as the very basis and limit of their
2 The distinction between science and art takes on sociological importance only inasmuch as the one or the other is diagnosed as having more or less cultural force. For the rest, the distinction breaks down into pedantries about immediately available to common sense. Yet even common sense is a residue of old arts and sciences, something like a cultural deposit of perception. Every brave art or new science, however, departs from common sense and thus must appear in the beginning, before it is established, as culturally subversive.
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vocations. Precisely for this reason both, analyst and modern intellectual, feel the futility built into their vocations. They are charter members of the negative community, in which member- ship carries precious few obligations and the corporate effort is devoted mainly to objecting to the rules. Yet, despite growing regret among its critics, the civilization of authority continues to fade into history; more accurately, it has become dysfunctional. Freud was acutely aware of this. Seen from the vantage point of membership in the negative community, all positive ones appear either fraudulent or stupid; despite a massive effort by profes- sional psychoanalysts to remain clinical therapists rather than culture critics, there is nothing in psychoanalysis that makes them any the less so.
Since a less negative sense of vocation can be instilled only in a community blessed with both a rank order of vocations and some objective means of assigning vocations, as in a civilization of authority, the patient, when he is sent out "cured," can only make himself his own vocation. To the extent of his intellectual and emotional capacity, he joins the negative community; he settles down to limit more or less capably the power of the culture in which he lives to sink deeper into his self. A certain autonomy from the penetrative thrust of culture: this is the characteristic of the new individuality. Freud himself realized this. When Freud rejected the notion of psychoanalysis as a propaedeutic to accepting one or another religious community, he imagined an ideal patient, one so strengthened that he could tolerate a return to nothing more compelling than an environ- ment in which the ego could fight more capably for itself in the subtle and universal war of all against all.
I have summed up, elsewhere,° Freud's attack on the moraliz- ing function of modern culture. It was not always the case; but nowadays, in the circumstances of modernity, to be religious is, he thought, to be sick: it is an effort to find a cure where no one
8 «The Analytic Attitude," Encounter, Vol. XVII, No. 6 (June, 1962), pp. 22-28.
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can possibly survive. For Freud, religious questions induce the very symptoms they seek to cure. "The moment a man ques- tions the meaning and value of life," Freud wrote (in a letter to Marie Bonaparte),* "he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence." The analyst, proudly, needs no synthesis. But, in scorning a synthesis, he is opposing the dynamics of culture. It is precisely as the culture fails that "not only the patient's analysis but that of the analyst himself has ceased to be terminable and become an interminable task." The exercise of reason is trans- formed into a parody of that contemplative way of life which characterizes most religious representatives of the old culture. Faith develops a simulacrum in analysis; the churches break up into warring sects. Here is the first step toward trying to explain the "psychoanalytic movement," which is a subtle contradiction in terms.
To be analytical is to be a realist. It is not required of a realist to be hopeful or hopeless, but only truthful. Among Freud's first and most important followers there were those who con- sidered his realism therapeutically limiting; nor did they find that the dynamics of the transference supplied an adequate substitute. They refused to approach reality in Freud's neutralist terms. Faith reappeared, understood in terms of therapy. This was done rather easily, for religion has always had a therapeutic aspect, in one of two ways which it is important to review.
It is essential to the understanding of the function of religion that it presents jointly and in fusion two analytically discernible alternatives: either a therapeutic control of everyday life or a therapeutic respite from that very control. On the one hand, faith is doctrinal, and that doctrine is internalized thus becoming functionally anti-instinctual. On the other hand, faith is ecstatic, or erotic; there is a relative absence of doctrinal internalization,
4 Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. by Ernst L. Freud (New York, 1960), p. 436.
5 "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," Collected Papers (London, 1950), Vol. 5, P. 353.
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and the religious mood covertly provides an opportunity for the instincts to express themselves more directly-for example, in orgiastic behavior, or in mystical states of mind which release the subject from traditional authority.
Defined as control of conduct in everyday life, faith tends to be methodical and systematic. Defined as remission of that control, faith tends to be anti-methodical and unsystematic. To the extent that a system of faith spreads, the line between usual and unusual religious experience grows fuzzy. In effect, religious experience becomes less unusual as it becomes functionally more influential on the conduct of everyday life—this will apply not to all elements, of course, but precisely to those which give some assurance of being saved, whatever that may mean in a particular religious system. This assurance is then taken as a basis of good-because efficacious-behavior.
In order to assure a continuity of mood, there must be limits to its expression. Religious emotionalism may lead to psychic collapse-to that desolate feeling Christians once experienced as "abandonment by God." Historically, various methods are known to exist for keeping up a sense of assurance, which may have had its origin in a state of ecstasy. These methods may be fairly called "ascetic": for example, various forms of abstinence, control of breathing, and even semi-starvation. Such ascetic devices, if they are functional, prolong, even regularize, the subjective feeling of security. To preserve this sense of ultimate security is thus the first function of all asceticism and of the classical disciplines of thought-training-now called "brainwash- ing." To perpetuate themselves, religious doctrines ordinarily develop modes of psychological retraining; conversely, all psy- chological retraining develops some of the characteristics of religious doctrine. History supplies enough examples of that deliberate emptying of consciousness, which may be the essential characteristic of all systems of therapy.
If successful, these therapeutic controls tend to spread out into the culture as a whole. Everyone, in every activity of life
[36]
should have the correct attitude; and, moreover, every activity of life should be brought to terms with the system of control. Any type of action that seems to subvert these controls must either be ruled as incorrect and dangerous, or else sanctioned and brought within the system of control. For example, in the Chinese arts, the pentatonic scale was decreed as correct by Confucian doctrine.
All such systems of therapeutic control, limiting as they do the area of spontaneity, are anti-instinctual; what we mean, ordinarily, by cultures, are just these systems. We call these systems "therapeutic" because these controls are intended to preserve a certain established level of adequacy in the social functioning of the individual, as well as forestall the danger of his psychological collapse. Needless to say, such systems of control-whether Christian, Buddhist, or any other-are au- thoritarian. The classical modes of anti-authoritarianism revolve around therapeutic respites from control; anti-authoritarianism, therefore, has always been vulnerable to the charge of being culturally (i.e. morally) subversive.
In Freud's conception, therapy is indeed a mechanism for establishing self-control. But this therapy is morally neutral. Faith, however, even one that accents the remission of control, is never neutral. The analytic attitude is an alternative to all religious ones.
Yet, being alternatives, psychoanalytic and religious therapies bear curious resemblances. Both demand complete honesty in performance; only thus can both become ways of finding out what is wrong with oneself. The process of receiving help in finding out what is inwardly wrong presupposes establishment of that inner attitude whereby the patient, or the worshiper, may become more receptive to the sources of help. Finally, psycho- analysis and faith converge as ways in which character can be transformed. Being interested in the transformation of character, both are essentially cultural in nature. If psychoanalysis is to be a
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science, it must be a moral science no less than a science of morals, as Freud tried to have it. After Freud, all the figures discussed in the following chapters have tried, in their disparate ways, to go so far beyond psychologizing that it would become a way of life, that culture would be destroyed as a system of controlling consolations and reconstructed as a system of more immediate releases of impulse. Freud was mistaken in his judg- ment of "the wildest revolutionaries.' They did not so much seek some new consolation as that culture of release which would render the many consolations of high culture unneces- sary. However, what they achieved was new consolations, locked forever in a struggle against defensive cultural ideologies. In this light, Freud appears as the critical defender of high culture, attacked in different ways by Jung, Reich and Law- rence.
Arguments are ineffectual unless supported by events. The Freudian argument, orthodox and schismatic, had been persua- sive among certain sectors of the educated classes in combination with historical circumstances. It has been adapted to the Ameri- can scene, in ways Freud would not approve,® for purposes Freud would have approved, so that those who must rid them- selves of the burden of their atavistic self-identities, can now do so.
In other parts of the world, an identical process of cultural disemburdenment is taking place under bureaucratic auspices, forcing cultural change through the political apparatus. Entire societies are being pruned-of dead literature, of withering attachments. The weight of the past has suddenly been felt on entire continents. The urge to cast off the yoke has spread very far-it can be called "progressive" in a subtle and misleading sense only. Hitler destroyed the German past as thoroughly as the Asian Communists are destroying theirs. But the revolution of our time has gone beyond politics; it is being waged as
6 i.e., by vulgar and partial incorporations into popular culture.
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fiercely in the Asias of the mind-Freud, not Marx, is the dominant figure here. Freud's legacy is still a vitally growing thing, particularly in its misuse as a modality of faith.
That our inherited moral systems have failed us, that we have been thrown back on our own psychological resources precisely in an era when other resources have been socialized, accounts in a measure for the appeal of Freud. His work was an attempt to strengthen our inner resources against what he considered obso- lete cultural systems of inhibitions. Our inherited moral systems have not been either alive enough or dead enough to permit fulfillment of our rising expectations of happiness. Formerly, if men were miserable, they went to church, so as to find the rationale of their misery; they did not expect to be happy-this idea is Greek, not Christian or Jewish. Freud embarked on a modest experiment: his doctrine promises not more happiness but less misery. He fought for human freedom in its plainer negative sense. Like those who worked for shorter hours but nevertheless feared what men might do with more leisure, Freud would have welcomed more constructive releases from our stale moralities but did not propose to substitute a new one. Our private ethics were his scientific problem; he had no new public ethic to suggest, no grand design for the puzzle of our common life. He will not help those who suffer from residual beliefs to find new beliefs; he can only help us in our unbelief. Whether, and by what criteria, his method of moral re-education will succeed or fail in a given case, depends on the soundness of his analysis of culture; that he was engaged in a great pacifying cultural mission, the moral disarmament of Western man, no student of the warring beliefs against which Freudianism is a reaction can shrug off. We may disagree with Freud on one point or another; we cannot dismiss him, except so far as he has succeeded and there changed the nature of our common prob- lem. Nor can Freud's contribution to the new history of our old emotions be dismissed by a mere gesture of respect toward his greatness. There have been other great psychologists; they have
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not perceptibly affected our daily conduct--more particularly, our view of our daily conduct. Indeed, psychology need not have anything at all to do with morals, no more than religion need have anything to do with God. Much of what is still taught in our schools as psychology revolves around problems other than those of moral conduct; lobotomists of pigeons, e.g., are entirely within their rights in calling themselves psychologists- insofar as their observations of the learning behavior of pigeons might be used to form hypotheses about the learning behavior of men. But Freud's is a psychology that matters culturally. Flis psychology not only studies the conduct of life but seeks also to affect it. For that reason alone, it is just to call Freud's a moral psychology, whatever one's judgment as to its scientific merits.
Social scientists have not quite caught up with Freud. When they will, they might find he has upset their disciplines. His roving genius is one reason for the indiscipline that overcame the psychoanalytic movement. To some, his example was conta- gious; they too roved. For others, he roved too much; they became more orthodox than Freud. Neither rationalist nor TO- mantic, neither realist nor nominalist, neither progressive nor reactionary-all and none-Freud belongs to the succession of great minds from Rousseau through Nietzsche: these are the psychologues who would transform our emotions into ideas, who would spin new universes of discourse out of their own seething discontent. This is more than science, more than art-it is another sort of reality into which it is said one must enter personally in order to comprehend it. It is another kind of self- consciousness. Such genius can change a culture. I shall try to indicate in a preliminary way the character-type of this emer- gent culture as reflected in the Freudian and post-Freudian genius.
Psychological man is, of course, a myth-but not more of a myth than other model men around whom we organize our self- interpretations. This is the time to evoke this new man, tease him
7 Cf. Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, Chap. I.
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out as the holder of the reins, to assume command of our emotional chaos. He is the sane self in a mad world, the inte- grated personality in the age of nuclear fission, the quiet answer to loud explosions. All this may be too ephemeral, as yet, to lay Out the psychological man for an anatomy lesson as economic man has been laid out-his anxious Protestant heart, his open Enlightenment eyes, his democratic accents dissected and probed now by every student doctor of the social sciences. It may be too early to squeeze my fragile conception dry between the hard covers of a book. I am merely announcing his presence, flutter- ing in all of us, a response to the absent God. In so doing, I say that the modern man is not in the position of a wise man exhibiting a fool, or that of a healthy man examining the sick; we are all fools, all sick--and until we can control the shock of this recognition we shall not be able to assess the character of our age correctly. That a new myth of man is developing, at least among the educated classes, seems evident to me. It is a response to the divisiveness and destruction without and to the chaos within. But we are ourselves involved in the creation of this new myth of man and cannot be expected to see the type in clear perspective.
Nevertheless, psychological man can already be approached with the confidence that he is alive and prospering among us, nurturing his sense of well-being, the healthy hypochondriac who rightly expects to survive all interpretation. Who, without Freud, would so well know how to live with no higher purpose than that of a durable sense of well-being? Freud has systema- tized our unbelief; his is the most inspiring anti-creed yet offered a post-religious culture. Throw away all the old keys to the great riddles of life; depth in psychology brings men's minds around from such simplicities to the complexity of everyday tournaments with existence, to an active resignation in matters as they are, to a modest hope, and to satisfiable desires. Balance is the delicate ethic Freud proposes, balance on the edge that separates futility and ultimate purposelessness from immediate
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effectiveness and purpose. Psychological man may be going nowhere, but he aims to achieve a certain speed and certainty in going. Like his predecessor, the man of the market economy, he understands morality as that which is conducive to increased activity. The important thing is to keep going.
In retrospect, of course, it seems inevitable that some of Freud's followers should have grown dissatisfied with the rest- lessness of the analytic attitude and its terrifying acceptance of so much effort without a unifying aim. The chief gentile of the psychoanalytic attitude, Jung, did not tolerate for long the healthy-mindedness that Freud had imposed upon his science. Jung's premature restiveness led him to propose, instead, the "adapted attitude." Therapeutically adapted, men could at least reconcile their own particular fantasy life with the one or the other of those universal and historic forms of fantasy, sometimes memorialized in religions, called "archetypes" by Jung. The "adapted attitude" would permit the patient to see the analyst with his professional guard down, as just another man, no less puzzled and in search than the patient himself. Patient and analyst might even continue that search for guiding principles beyond therapy, together. Jung represents a conservative, or traditionalist, trumping of the psychoanalytic game. He is perhaps the most subtle of modern conservatives, trying to save not this tradition or that, but the very notion of tradition, which can be defined, in Jungian terms, as shared archetypes internalized. When the theologians will finally catch up with Jung, they might discover in him that particular psychology for which they have been seeking, in a prolonged agony, a substitute for all those ontologies crumbling at the foundation of theology.
For more than a century now, theologians have been screen- ing psychologists in the hope of finding one who could rescue theology for them. Writing to his old Oxford tutor in 1857, one of the more honest religious figures of the century, the first Archbishop Temple, put into clear English what had been muddled in German ever since the time of Schleiermacher:
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Our theology has been cast in a scholastic mould, all based on logic. We are in need of, and we are actually being forced into, a theology based on psychology.8
Following Pascal, both Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard had tried to psychologize the old theology; both failed because both remained, like Pascal, too apologetically Christian. The religious feelings needed a psychological renaissance less traditionally Christian and yet broad enough to permit a fresh Christian apologetic to be read into it. Jung has supplied that psychology; for apologists there remains only the task to use it for their own purposes.
The greatest psychologist of our century, Freud, was all but oblivious to this need among the religious. When Freud did hear the call, late in life, he anathematized it in The Future of an Illusion and rendered it peculiarly Jewish in Moses and Mono- theism. Jung, his one-time heir apparent, was never hostile to theology-only to the theologians. It is not that in his writings on religion Jung had played the believing Protestant, as Freud played the unbelieving Jew. Jung was far too intent on supply ing a new basis for culture to be either extremely polemical or mysteriously personal, as Freud was with Moses: there Freud made a final but ambivalent effort to dismiss the religious ques- ton in his own life by transforming it into a psychohistorical process.
No one can know the exact wording of Jung's title to greatness. However it may be explained and qualified, the legiti macy of that title will depend in part upon the success of his attempt to install a psychology where ontology once reigned.
Religious appreciation of Jung grows slowly. The simple and the sophisticated are both rightly suspicious, and they are so for what amounts to the same reason: the simple because Jung encourages a religiosity other than their own, the sophisticated because Jung encourages religiosity per se, as if all forms of it were merely therapeutic. Religion, thus rendered functional,
8 Memoirs of Archbishop Temple (London, 1859), II, p. 517.
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loses, however, its therapeutic effect. For the sophisticated, Jung would be a godsend. Yet they are deterred from accepting him by a prevailing suspicion of precisely his traditionalist revision of psychoanalysis. The professionally religious, timid, overworked, and poorly educated as they are, have had neither the time nor the intellectual stamina necessary to realize that the man for whom they had been waiting for more than a century was recently among them, that a placable psychology of archetypes stands ready waiting for them to adapt and make comprehen- sible the concepts to which they once could point only as archaic theologies, stiff and unresponsive even to the warmest, most personal appeals.
Jung himself well understood the importance of what he had to offer. In his own experience as a therapist, he discovered a fresh source for the familiar mood of discontent among the civilized. That discontent was no longer with rigid and out- worn meanings impinging upon our vital impulses. It is not the repressions that trouble us now but the permissions. It is "the meaninglessness of life that causes the disturbance in the uncon- scious." For Jung's patients past the age of thirty-five, as for a mature civilization in general, the "problem in the last resort" consists in finding "a religious outlook on life." This is no doctrine of maturity like that of Freud, with its acceptance of meaninglessness as the end product of analytic wisdom. As a protestant against the severity of the analytic attitude, Jung took a dangerous road, toward some new summit of saving nonsense. The normality of disillusion and a controlling sense of resigna- tion, which was the most for which Freud had hoped, appeared to Jung the beginning rather than the end of therapy. He proposed to continue beyond the point where Freud felt any honest analyst must leave off. Therefore, Jung went about his self-appointed task of finding a new "meaning" for it all, and was paradoxical enough to be at once analytic and religious. Jung pushed the therapeutic question beyond the limit set by Freud. Once having raised for therapeutic considerations the
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question of community, Jung never managed to escape and hide himself behind the professional persona of the analyst. He be- came, instead, to the limit of his ability, a synthetist. His con- structions may be shaky, the community mysterious-but this revision of Freud is undoubtedly important, at least to those who cannot sustain an analytic attitude, interminably, in a cul- ture perpetually claiming the prerogatives of youthfulness.
For a reader accustomed to the elegance and coherence of Freud's style, or indeed to the clean lines of good English prose, a few pages of Jung can be a discouraging experience. He is discursive, pompous; his style meanders from a sermonette through excursus and back to the main point again, which is then repeated as though the writing were the transcript of a long hortatory conversation with a sleepy disciple. Jung was an erudite scholar in the eighteenth-century sense of the word. Instead of Freud's interminable analysis he had the habit of interminable associations. Probably, he left no note unused; nothing could be left out because, being analytically sophisti cated, Jung knew that nothing historical, viewed psychologi- cally, has merely antiquarian interest. Filled on almost every page with the heaped rubble of incidental erudition, all made relevant and connected by Jung's sense of its import as a stratum of psychological meaning, his collected works are formidable for the wrong reason. He drives ploddingly an overloaded tumbril of traditions along a highway built for swifter traffic, as if to stop the modern rush forward toward a form of culture he did not approve of-and which, he believed, cannot endure man because man cannot endure such an "'unspirituality." Delighting in the past, Jung arraigned the present with anecdotes about archaic superiorities. Antiquarian learning clutters his pages. But the modern reader has been trained to treat as an obstacle to comprehension just that form of erudition in which eighteenth- century readers delighted, as ancient road signs indicating which
9 For a detailed analysis of Jung's erudition, see Chap. 5, Pp. 126-129.
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way to truth was worth taking, the longer way round deemed to be the better. Too often, Jung dogmatizes where the reader of English prose expects to find an explanation or at least a tight argument. This dogma, however, is a plastic bag made to hold any fluid content.
Given Jung's conservative purpose, he cannot be considered a dogmatic writer. His ventures into the field of direct religious commentary are more tentative and exploratory, because more questing than those of Freud. He tried something that Freud, in his professional neutralism with respect to values, deliberately avoided: a psychotherapeutics that leads beyond itself toward a reintegration of our culture. To those who have abandoned the quest altogether, or reformulated it, so that the direction is neither upward toward God nor downward toward the Uncon- scious, Jung's total effort can mean little or nothing-and may appear outright nonsensical.
There are those who suffer from what Jung called "the urban neurosis of atheism, " for whom this suffering is less painful than the cure of faith. Travelers toward the emotional left of the moral value scale will not readily agree that the historic gods, far from being a negation of the individual's desire to complete himself, are "actually the strongest and most effective 'position' the psyche can reach." Jung is here assuming that every man and every culture has, built in, a god-term. From this it follows, for him, that the "strongest and therefore the decisive factor in any individual psyche compels the same belief or fear, submission or devotion which a God would demand from man." The object of therapy, in the Jungian sense, is, therefore, to reconcile the individual to whatever authority he carries within himself. Such an authority is inescapable; the wise man adapts himself to it. Indeed, in therapy one seeks just that authority which experi- ence, now set in a confusedly anti-authoritarian frame, has hidden from the individual, sick to that degree in which he cannot find the authority directing his inner lite.
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Jung could not have moved any further than this from Freud's position. Culture, Freud thought, may be inherently authoritarian; but for just this reason it is the interminable task of analysis to break the strangleholds of authority on the psyche. To learn, from Jung, that "anything despotic and inescapable is in this sense "God.' will amuse the majority who believe that, with or without Freud, they have escaped their "God." but it will alienate the minority still anxious to learn a method of escape. Freud has instructed a generation no longer willing to commit itself, as Freud himself did, to the belief that culture must be accepted as a despotic and inescapable god. The uncom- mitted may be called post-Freudians, but they trust instinct as much as they suspect culture. Of course Freud prepared the way for the post-Freudians; the price to be paid for being cultured is, after all, a doctrinal point of major consequence to Freud. On the other hand, Freud's view of culture as despotic was never complemented by a doctrine of the instincts as be- nign. The post-Freudians could be called more accurately Reich- ians, for it was Reich who first shifted the Freudian attack entirely from instinct to culture.
There is a curious Marxism among the post-Freudians that calls for an explanation. Reich may well have been the first Freudo-Marxist, as he titled himself; but he was not the last. In contrast to Reich's original Bolshevik stridency, the post-Freud- ins have been democratic and socialist-though Marxist, none- theless.
In Jung, Adler, Reich, and in many others among his major followers as well as opponents, Freud's analytic patience ran out. Only the minor followers remained orthodox; the others wanted something more than a middle way between emergency treat- ment and the illusion of a permanent cure. Each sought to combine analysis with a therapy of commitment, complete with symbolic, or a real return to some saving community-Christian, Marxist, or merely Reichian, for example. The schismatics have a certain analytic power, although far inferior to Freud's; more
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importantly, all have the authority of experience on their side, for it is probably the community that cures.1o
Freud never objected to alternative therapies, if they worked. His rejection of commitment therapies derives not so much from wounded vanity at having been abandoned by favored disciples as from his belief that there were no longer extant any commu- nites wherein men could safely invest their troubled emotions in the hope of higher dividends.
10 On the general relation between therapy and community, see especially Chap. 3.
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The Impoverishment of Western Culture
We are very often obliged, for therapeutic purposes, to oppose the super-ego, and we endeavor to lower its demands. Exactly the same objections can be made against the ethical demands of the cultural super-ego.—Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents
The higher dividends are essentially symbolic in nature. They are, in Freudian terms, the cultural equivalents of dividends which might be experienced more directly-if only a culture could stand the strain of immediate satisfactions. By setting a limit on the functional value of the higher dividends for most men, Freud declared that the religious question, in its inherited form, as a self-abnegation achieved with moral artistry, was no longer worth asking. This total rejection of the religious question gives even Marxism a pious look. By such a rejection psychoanalysis contributes to that symbolic impoverishment which is the only poverty a culture, as distinct from either a society or an individual, may suffer.
Wealth may define a status, or enhance a role, in the social system. Analysis may supply the energy an ego needs to strengthen its control over the deceits lodged in the unconscious by the failing means through which salvation was purchased, in the inherited culture. Both affluence and analysis may be viewed,
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especially in the United States, as intimations of successor modes to a culture defined by its particular symbolic of inner ordi-nances. Where those inner ordinances become subject to diagnostic control, as themselves conducive to suffering, there are forceful symbolisms operating against that culture itself. Of course, to suggest the relief of suffering by diagnosing the failure of the inner ordinances is no revolutionary departure from the way successor symbolics always have struggled for cultural ascendancy-except when that successor symbolic was unable to offer a superior set of ordinances. But this describes the modern condition. The emergent symbolic is radically different from its predecessors.
Heretofore, the saving arrangements of Western culture have appeared as symbol systems communicating demands by stoning the sensual with deprivations, and were thus operated in a dynamically ambivalent mode. Our culture developed, as its general technique of salvation, assents to moral demands that treated the sensual part of the self as an enemy. From mastery over this enemy-self there developed some triumphant moral feeling; a character ideal was born. Every man was thus born twice, the second time as a creature aspiring to a moral artistry trained by deprivations. In sum, the classical character ideals were all personifications of a release from a multitude of desires.
Not only our Western system but every system of integrative moral demand, the generative principle of culture, expressed itself in positive deprivations-in a character ideal that functioned to commit the individual to the group. Culture was thus the establishment and organization of restrictive motives. Men engaged in disciplines of interdiction. The dialectic of deprivation and remission from deprivation was in the service of those particular interdicts by which a culture constituted itself. The analytic attitude does contain a certain time-element of asceti-cism, but it points toward a character ideal that is in principle anti-ascetic and therefore revolutionary if viewed from perspectives formed in the inherited moral demand system. The dialec-
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tic of perfection, based on a deprivational mode, is being succeeded by a dialectic of fulfillment, based on the appetitive mode.
The analytic attitude is a doctrine developed for the private wants of private men, and shifts with the individual. In trying to describe this doctrinal aspect of psychological manhood, it appears to me as an anti-doctrine, one that dismisses the therapeutic compulsions of all doctrines as ultimately ineffective. Psychological man takes on the attitude of a scientist, with himself alone as the ultimate object of his science. If the analytic therapy has been effective, the therapeutic learns to keep in touch with the options around which the conduct of his life might be organ-ized; ideally, all options ought to be kept alive because, theoreti-cally, all are equally advisable-or inadvisable, in given personal circumstances. Not all homosexuals ought to be cured, nor should all stabilities, which may be achieved painfully and at great cost, be disturbed because of the pain that accompanies their achievement. Life is individual. Well-being is a delicate personal achievement, and only a vulgarization of the analytic attitude would permit easy or general judgments on any such achievement. No analyst or trained student of the painful ambiguities that have contributed to some individual sense of wellbeing would be so foolish as to tamper with it-so long as it works. Since no firm social standards for treatment have yet been erected, some grave ambiguities persist regarding the question of just who should be treated. There may be a kindness that is neurotic, if it develops out of unconscious compulsions, and a cruelty that is normal, if it is freely and consciously determined upon. So far as sainthood is determined by unconscious and uncontrolled motives, it is neurotic; so far as sinning, as usually understood, is determined by conscious and rational choice, it is normal. One difficulty with the criteria of rationality and consciousness is that Eichmann, for instance, might well be considered quite without need of treatment. He knew what he was
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doing; indeed, he wanted to be a great success in his career. Freud was honest enough to discover that there was no inherent relation between normality and the norm, such as had been established, in the age of political and religious man, through the mediating myth that there were natural laws. The analytic attitude has discovered no natural harmony of goals, no hierarchy of value inscribed upon the universe. Confronted by the equality of choice, the individual could resort to the analytic attitude in order to limit the folly of being drawn too far outside the protective management of his own pleasures.
To reserve the capacity for neutrality between choices, even while making them, as required by this new science of moral management, produces a strain no less great than choosing itself. The analytic capacity demands a rare skill: to entertain multiple perspectives upon oneself, and even upon beloved others. A high level of control is necessary in order to shift from one perspective to another, so to soften the demands upon oneself in all the major situations of life-love, parenthood, friendship, work, and citizenship. Such conscious fluidity of commitment is not easily acquired. In fact, the attainment of psychological manhood is more difficult than any of the older versions of maturity; that manhood is no longer protected by a fantasy of having arrived at some resting place where security, reassurance, and trust reside, like gods in their heavens. The best one can say for oneself in life is that one has not been taken in, even by that "normal psychosis," love.
Freud understood the dangers inherent in a situation in which the precious individual was vulnerable to the charge that his life had become meaningless. In answer, he asserted that no fresh access of doctrine could for long decrease that vulnerability. In such cases, the individual merely built his neurosis the more deeply into his character, hiding it behind some unstable equilibrium of faithful action. All such action systems of faith, with the neurotic factor as the mediating agent, brought more grief than relief to the modern individual in search of a cure for
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himself. Faith could not enter deeply enough. The internalities, being weak, had sickened, where they had not (to the betterment of the patient) died. The old therapies of action, based upon some saving truths (and authoritative institutions), no longer relieved the individual of the most oppressive of his tensions-those developing in his own private circles of love and friendship. For these therapies were based on now ineffectual attempts to bring the individual far out of himself, into some relation with an order of institutions that underwrote his sense of well-being. With the decline of a civilization of authority, the therapeutic requirement shifted toward an action which would take place, first, within the circle of personal relations; after this first level of private re-education had been successfully nego-tiated, the public life could then in time be altered. A new kind of community could be constructed, one that did not generate conscience and internal control but desire and the safe play of impulse. From this pneuma pulsing through the intimate world of friendship and love, the next culture gives signs that it will emerge-a culture that would not oppose the self but express more fully its varieties.
Dichotomies between an ultimately meaningful and meaningless existence belong to the eras of public philosophies and communal theologies. Ecologically, this transitional civilization is becoming one vast suburbia, something like the United States, populated by divided communities of two, with perhaps two junior members caught in the middle of a private and not always civil war; in relation to these intimate, though divided, communities of two, the public world is constituted as one vast stranger, who appears at inconvenient times and makes demands viewed as purely external and therefore without the power to elicit a genuinely moral response.
In the time of public philosophies and social religions, the great communities were positive. A positive community is characterized by the fact that it guarantees some kind of salvation to
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the individual by virtue of his membership and participation in that community. That sort of community seemed corrupt to the economic man, with his particular version of an ascetic ideal tested mainly by self-reliance and personal achievement. The positive community was displaced, in social theory, by the neutral market. Now, in the middle of the twentieth century, the market mechanism appears not so much corrupt as a fiction to psychological man, with his awareness of how decisions are made in the social system. In order to participate self-protec-tively in the manipulative and acquisitive game, psychological man builds his tight family island, living for the remainder of his time in negative communities. But these collections of little islands surrounded by therapeutic activities, without any pretense at a doctrine of salvation, are themselves infected by the negativity of the larger community and become manipulative arenas themselves, rather than oases of escape from the larger arena.
The indefinite prolongation of psychoanalytic therapy is itself a form of membership in the negative community. Positive communities were, according to Freud, held together by guilt; they appear attractive only now, in distant retrospect, but the modern individual, faced with the necessity of merging his own life into communal effort, would have found them suffocating. Instead, the modern individual can only use the community as the necessary stage for his effort to enhance himself-if not always, or necessarily, to enrich himself.
In one certain way, the therapeutically inclined individual resembles his predecessor, the ascetic. That resemblance can be best sketched historically.
Once launched into some activity, conceiving of himself as an instrument of God's will, the ascetic did not stop to ask about the meaning of it all. On the contrary, the more furious his activity, the more the problem of what his activity meant receded from his mind. In time, the Western ascetic ceased cultivating his doctrinal imagination. For a time, perhaps for a
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century, the sheer intensity of his action carried him along to greater power and prosperity; the atrophy of doctrinal imagination caused only mild alarms. But, in the nineteenth century, there were signs of trouble all over this failing ascetic culture. Questions were being raised, at first by literary men; symptoms were being observed, by all manner of men.
The most congenial climate for the training of the therapeutic has been in a waning ascetic culture like that of Protestant America. It is specially true of this Calvinist culture that it proved a breeding ground for remissive equivalents to the original ascetic motives in which the emphasis is on retraining for a fuller activity and not on the achievement of some new general meaning. One permitting condition for this therapeutic successor to the ascetic was already present in the assumption of the Protestant activist that the will, or motive, of his God was unsearchable and His ways quite inexplicable, so that they could not be understood by any human standard. To meet the demands of the day was as near as one could come to doing the pious thing, in this-God's-world. To trouble about meaning was really an impiety and, of course, frivolous, because futile. For the question of meaning, therefore, neither the ascetic nor the therapeutic type feels responsible, if his spiritual discipline has been successful. The recently fashionable religious talk of "ultimate concern" makes no sense either in the ascetic or in the therapeutic mode. To try to relate "ultimate concern" to everyday behavior would be exhausting and nerve-shattering work; indeed, it could effectively inhibit less grandiose kinds of work. Neither the ascetic nor the therapeutic bothers his head about "ultimate concern." Such a concern is for mystics who cannot otherwise enjoy their leisure. In the workaday world, there are no ultimate concerns, only present ones. Therapy is the respite of every day, during which the importance of the present is learned, and the existence of what in the ascetic tradition came to be called the "ultimate" or "divine" is unlearned. Those remote areas of experience are brought up only in order to be
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put in their proper place, as dead events and motives rather than as the models for events and motives of the present life. Analytic therapy is thus a form of re-education; Freud specifically called it that. It is re-education so far as it eliminates those symptoms through which the patient has tried, mistakenly, to resolve the contradictions in his life.
Therapeutic re-education is therefore at once a difficult and yet modest procedure. It teaches the patient-student how to live with the contradictions that combine to make him into a unique personality; this it does in contrast to the older moral peda-gogies, which tried to re-order the contradictions into a hierarchy of superior and inferior, good and evil, capabilities. To become a psychological man is thus to become kinder to the self as a whole, to the private parts of it as well as to the public ones, to the once inferior as well as to the formerly superior. While older character types were concentrating on the life task of trying to order the warring parts of the personality into a hierarchy, modern pedagogies, reflecting the changing self-conception of this culture, are far more egalitarian: it is the task of psychological man to develop an informed (i.e., healthy) respect for the sovereign and unresolvable basic contradictions that make him the singularly complicated human being he is.
Freud's most important ideas finally may have less to do with the repression of sexual impulses (which explains neither the past discontents of our civilization nor the present ones), than with ambivalence. It is their capacity to reverse feelings that is the human problem and hope. What hope there is derives from Freud's assumption that human nature is not so much a hierarchy of high-low, and good-bad, as his predecessors believed, but rather a jostling democracy of contending predispositions, deposited in every nature in roughly equal intensities. Where there is love, there is the lurking eventuality of hatred. Where there is ambition, there is the ironic desire for failure. Although he wishes not to know it, a sore loser may be sore mainly because he almost won and is reacting against his wish to lose.
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Psychoanalysis is full of such mad logic; it is convincing only if the student of his own life accepts Freud's egalitarian revision of the traditional idea of an hierarchical human nature.
Yet, although Freud had proclaimed this major revision in the Western self-image, he was himself sentimentally attached to the old hierarchical assumption. On the one hand, he analyzed the damage done by this hierarchical structuring of human nature into pejoratively toned "higher" and "lower" categories -indeed, it was precisely this damage that he made it his business to mend. On the other hand, he hoped that somehow, despite the near equality of our warring emotions, reason would cleverly manage to reassert itself, despite its congenital weakness-not in the high and mighty way preached by Plato and his Christian successors but in a modest, even sly manner that would alternately dazzle and lull the more powerful emotions into submission. This way actually demands, it seems, the kind of character ideal we have called the "therapeutic" in order to contrast it with the more rigid character ideal produced by the moral demand systems preceding modernity. In the age of psychologizing, clarity about oneself supersedes devotion to an ideal as the model of right conduct.
We can now understand better why Freud was an inveterate finder of double meanings, even of some that may not be there; why the latent makes sense only as it contradicts the manifest; why the aggressive movement behind the friendly gesture needs the complement of the friendly gesture. For thus Freud succeeded in challenging simplicity, in particular moral simplicity. He encouraged a tolerance of what used to be called, in general, the "low," just as he encouraged a new respect for the young, for the deviant, and for the shocking. There was about Freud a calm anticipation of the unexpected that subverted the expectations of a life based on older schemes of an authoritative, set, hierarchical order of conduct.
On the institutional level, the Freudian analysis reduced most obviously the hierarchical order of the family and, moreover, of
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the "head" of the family. This reductionism applied specially to the position of the father. In the European context, the father appeared also as the personification of all those heights of repressive command from which, Freud decided, the rules of the moral game could no longer effectively be handed down. Much as he admired the Moses-figures in our culture, Freud considered their techniques of exercising authority too costly.
A tolerance of ambiguities is the key to what Freud considered the most difficult of all personal accomplishments: a genuinely stable character in an unstable time. Yet, just this rare and fine capacity, rejecting as it does the value of ignorance, encourages an equally dangerous attitude when viewed from the perspective of the instability of the times: namely, an attitude of deliberate acquiescence. Being able to recognize the equivocations of which behavior is composed need not, however, mean their encouragement.
Nevertheless, there is a sound basis for what are otherwise hypocritical objections to the immorality of interpretation with which Freudians rip away the façades of moral action. Hypocrisy is a precious thing in any culture. Like reticence, it may help build up those habits of avoidance that swerve us from honest, but head-on, collisions with one another. Nothing in psychoanalytic therapy encourages immoral behavior. The immorality of interpretation aims merely at revealing moralized compulsions behind even the most correct and apparently straightforward behavior. This means that psychoanalysis discourages moral behavior on the old, self-defeating grounds-out of what is now called a sense of guilt rather than guilt.
To help us distinguish between guilt on the one hand and a sense of guilt on the other, between responsibility for an oftense committed and fantasies about offenses intended or merely imag-ined, seems a moral as well as a therapeutic aim. To suffer from scrupulosity is, after all, a well-known perversion of moral ambition, even according to the most elaborate of our established casuistries. But psychoanalysis is more than a mere scru-
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tiny of handwashing. Freud went more deeply than that. His ambition to exhaust the sense of guilt by clinical exposures of all details may be dangerous, as he himself realized, to the life of a culture that is on the defensive. If a self-trained casuist gets along better by resolving his guilt into a sense of guilt, then he is the healthier for that resolution. This is a vulgar and popular misinterpretation of Freud; but there is something about the presuppositions of psychoanalytic therapy that encourages just such misinterpretations. A man can be made healthier without being made better-rather, morally worse. Not the good life but better living is the therapeutic standard. It is a popular standard, not difficult to follow, as Americans, despite Freud's wish to make it difficult, were the first to recognize in any significant number.
Americans no longer model themselves after the Christians or the Greeks. Nor are they such economic men as Europeans believe them to be. The political man of the Greeks, the religious man of the Hebrews and Christians, the enlightened economic man of eighteenth-century Europe (the original of that mythical present-day character, the "good European"), has been superseded by a new model for the conduct of life. Psychological man is, I suggest, more native to American culture than the Puritan sources of that culture would indicate.
The therapeutic as an American type has outgrown his immediate ancestor in one clear sense, for both Socrates and Christ taught economic man to be at least slightly ashamed of himself when he failed to sacrifice the lower capacity to the higher. Freud is America's great teacher, despite his ardent wish to avoid that fate. For it was precisely the official and parental shams of high ideals that Freud questioned. In their stead, Freud taught lessons which Americans, prepared by their own national experi-ence, learn easily: survive, resign yourself to living within your moral means, suffer no gratuitous failures in a futile search for ethical heights that no longer exist-if they ever did. Freud proclaims the superior wisdom of choosing the second best. He
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is our Crito, become intellectually more subtle than the sick and old Socrates, who was still foolish enough to justify his own death sentence rather than escape from the prison of his own inhibitions about the sanctity of the state, which he mistakes for his father. Freud appeals to us because his wisdom is so cautious. Surely he is not to be blamed for living at a time when the inherited aspirations of the Greek, Christian, and Humanist past had gone stale, when both Athens and Jerusalem, not to mention Paris, Oxford, and the Italian Renaissance cities, have become tourist spots rather than shrines of pilgrims in search of spiritual knowledge. With no place to go for lessons in the conduct of contemporary life, every man must learn, as Freud teaches, to make himself at home in his own grim and gay little Vienna.
The alternatives with which Freud leaves us are grim only if we view them from the perspective of some past possibility, as though we were either political or religious men. Assuming that these character ideals are, in Freud's terms, regressive, the grimness is relieved by the gaiety of being free from the historic Western compulsion of seeking large and general meanings for small and highly particular lives. Indeed, the therapy of all therapies, the secret of all secrets, the interpretation of all interpretations, in Freud, is not to attach oneself exclusively or too passionately to any one particular meaning, or object. There is discernible in those who practice professionally the analytic attitude, that is, in the psychoanalysts themselves, a certain cultivated detachment and calm that is perhaps the highest expression of that individualism to which De Tocqueville first referred. In the most intimate of modern relations, the psychoanalytic transaction between analyst and patient, one of the members of that unique community of two must remain an almost total stranger to the other; only if the analyst draws a veil across his own life does he maintain his therapeutic effectiveness. In turn, the patient must learn how to draw the veil properly around himself. To accomplish this, he needs to develop the full power and liberty of his emotions, without paying the price of
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fixing them too firmly on any object or idea. This he is taught by the experience of ending his relation of intimacy to the analyst himself. Here, again, is the ascetic ideal, shorn of any informing goal or principle; thus divested of the need for compulsive attachments, the ascetic becomes the therapeutic. With Freud, individualism took a great and perhaps final step: toward that mature and calm feeling which comes from having nothing to hide. The individual need no longer keep a safe distance from the mass of his fellows. In therapy, developed as a social process, he will be so trained that vulnerability is minimized. To live on the surface prevents deep hurts. With Freud, Western man has learned the technical complexity of externalizing his inwardness, and has been able at last to usher out that crowd of shadows urging him to turn inward, so as to live in the bright, sober light of the present, where, ideally, the moment is always high noon. This is not isolation, for it is no longer confining. Nor is it a participation mystique, for the participatory action has nothing self-abnegating about it. Rather, the social therapy is liberating, rendering all objects of commitment instrumental to the therapeutic process itself. Such a clear-cut externalization as suggested here could characterize a culture developed far more highly than our present one. Doctrinal intimations along these lines are dealt with in the second half of this volume.
To be truly free and yet social means to cultivate detachment, as opposed to alienation. The therapeutic, even in erotic action, can do without attachment-indeed, he can do with and do without it, simultaneously, for relations that are too near and too fixed may lead to symptoms that destroy the capacity of an individual to live out his own life in ways of his own choosing. This is not to say that to live thus, detachedly, implies an absence of erotic company, or even an absence of the erotic manner. On the contrary, the therapeutic treats love instru-mentally. He is likely to be more circumspect and better behaved than his ascetic forebear, who was subject to mood fuctuations between wild passion and accidie, due in part to the
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rigid system of controls and overburdened devices of release. With a shift in the system, giving greater amplitude to the releasing devices, the subject personalities are likely to develop a more measured, calculated capacity in the use of their spon-taneity.
Freed from all suspicions of divinity, psychological man can continue to work efficiently in all kinds of institutions, but without permitting his feelings to be entrapped by institutional service. The ascetic was limited, and often broken, in his organizational usefulness by a naïve dedication to principle. It was as if man were made to be used by the organization, rather than the organization made to be used by man. For this character ideal of an autonomous man, using but unused, Americans already have put vulgar understandings of the analytic anti-symbolic to full use.1
There is a sense in which culture is always at one with the social system. In a society with so many inducements to self-interest, "self-realization" seems a noble and healthy end. The least valuable competitive position is to be self-defeating. The therapeutic cannot conceive of an action that is not self-serving, however it may be disguised or transformed. This is a culture in which each views the other, in the fullness of his self-knowledge, as "trash." Freud used the word to summarize his general opin-10n of people. But, the question remains: How to discipline the "trash"? To be liberated from renunciatory character ideals by the analytic attitude might give the "trash" (Freud's term) too much liberty to do its worst, whereas in the older system the "trash" would not do its best. One may think, therefore, an ethic of perfection to be more prudent, even on Freud's own assumptions about the human animal, than an ethic of tolerance.
Yet, probably the ethic of tolerance is the one more appropriate and safe for use in the age of psychological man. It is the ethic of a wayfarer rather than that of a missionary; it is the
1 Certainly, this was done without Freud's intention or approval. Representing Freud as a prophet of non-culture contradicts his own highest intentions.
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ethic of a pilgrim, who, out of his experience, became a tourist. Unfortunately for culture and good taste, the salesman cruelly parodies the preacher without being able to help doing so, for cultural history has allotted to the salesman the rhetorical style of a missionary. Freud distrusted that style, even in medical missionaries-or, more precisely, in missionaries of a non-saving medicine; he himself never tried to "sell" his doctrine, as now many of his successors have done, to their indubitable gain, with the nostrums known as "self-realization" and/or "self-fulfill-ment." What would suit the therapeutic ideal better than the prevalent American piety toward the self? This self, improved, is the ultimate concern of modern culture. If this culture develops further along lines indicated here, and if the social order moves in a parallel line, toward wider distribution of plenitude, then that general condition of detachment which prevents religious outburst and political revolution may well be established. Finally, even world government may come-with universal indifference as its cultural predicate.
Every culture is an institutionalized system of moral demands, elaborating the conduct of personal relations, a cosset of compelling symbols. Every culture is thus safely strapped to its functions. Its mode of integration defines also its limitations. For an individual to engage in a self-therapeutic effort, which must either ignore or contradict the meanings by which his character was molded, suggests either that the therapy must fail or that the culture is in the process of a change as to its control mechanism.
Thus, analyzing the analytic attitude, we may conclude, quite tentatively, that the American culture is in a remissive phase of transition to a new system of moral demands. Assuming this, the best strategy for the polemicists of the therapeutic, no less than for the ascetic, may be the playing of a waiting game: the former can use the analytic attitude to militate against renewals of the moral demand system, while the latter may seek to
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encourage renewals.? The power of the analytic attitude rests on the assumption that its proper exercise can cut off revitalization movements of the classical moral demand system. It was Freud's thought that no moral demand system could ever again compel at least the educated classes to that inner obedience which bound men to rules they themselves had made but then could not change except at the expense of spirit, far beyond the usefulness of such rules to the continuance of cultural achieve-ment. The waiting game has thus become the permanent strategy of the contending polemicists. It remains to be seen which side is waiting in vain-that which hopes for a vital faith or that which places its hopes in vitality itself.
The revolution of rising expectations is a major weapon in the warfare of the therapeutic against the ascetic. After all, there is something to the notion that the rich-even the rich Commu-nists-cannot take their respective religion too seriously. Even now, the rich Marxists must stave off the fanatics from poor Marxist countries. Comfort is the great social tranquilizer. This, in fact, sums up the revolutionary attitude of the rich and psychoculturally educated in the United States nowadays. Symbolic impoverishment ceases to be a problem precisely because the rich have found functional equivalents for a system of compelling moral demands, in analysis and in art, which may be said to be a mode of self-reverence. The old form of culture criticism, to the effect that our plenitude of things lies wasting and useless in a desert of belief, thus becomes irrelevant, being based on the outmoded assumption that a moral demand system must be hard and unyielding like the Sinai desert in order to be effective. On
2 There is a widespread hope among the more thoughtful and committed American Christian clergy that the Negro agitation will serve, providentially, to revitalize the moral demand system in the white American culture. Of course, there are religious motives among the Negroes. But the national good demands that they be educated up to the post-religious level of the whites as quickly as possible, if further civil disorder is to be avoided. Moreover, the Negro demand is for nothing less than what "integration" implies: their fair share of the national substance.
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the contrary, Freud's theory was that, under present and foreseeable conditions, only a yielding demand system-more prudent than principled-would be capable of sustaining itself.
When combined with the analytic attitude, affluence may be the alternative to questionable renewals of religion, taking the form of excessive moral demands, by which this culture has been regularly carried away in the past. Educated as they are, the rich have no need of religious renewals. In classical cultures, an ascended class had to justify itself before those below in the social structure. But the culture revolution of our time has eliminated this need for class- as well as self-justification. Never-theless, those below still seek to emulate the ascendant social class, without being convinced of its superiority. And just as the rich have lost their idea of superiority, so have the poor lost their idea of religion. Poverty is no longer holy; the poor, insofar as they are educated in the new doctrine, have no motive for projecting onto society a new set of strict moral demands that might infuse society with the kind of impetus needed to end symbolic poverty.
According to my reading of the past psychohistorical process, members of an ascending class would mobilize their spiritual energies by representing themselves as the carrier of new moral demands. This is the classic way in which, for example, the Puritan revolution occurred. Finally, after the revolutionary releasing phase had passed, the ascending class would use the symbol system as a control device; the same symbols that once justified its revolutionary attacks on the culture served later as control devices for the preservation and expansion of the system of moral demands the ascending class had first established for itself.
In time, every revolutionary renewal of moral demands appears to exhaust itself. The ascending class would take on some of the dominant characteristics of the class it replaced. Revolutions end in some form of restoration. Thus, a revival of faith comes to its end, as a rule, in a remissive establishment. In this
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perspective, the price of revivalist revolutions will always appear too high. And by this rationalization the system of moral demands as such is cast into doubt. What is at stake, in this elaboration of the theory of ambivalence, is the Western capacity for mounting new moral demands as inherently superior to those established minimally and sanctioned in the past.
It follows from this interpretation that the present struggle between the United States and the post-Stalinist Soviet Union is based on their being in different phases in the psychohistorical process, a difference which may be further resolved when both would understand that they share the same cultural aims. Both issue from the assumption that wealth is a superior and adequate substitute for symbolic impoverishment. Both American and Soviet cultures are essentially variants of the same belief in wealth as the functional equivalent of a high civilization. In both cultures, the controlling symbolism has been stripped down to a belief in the efficacy of wealth. Quantity has become quality. The answer to all questions of "what for?" is "more." The faith of the rich has always been in themselves. Rendered democratic, this religion proposes that every man become his own eleemosynary institution. Here is a redefinition of charity from which the inherited faith of Christianity may never recover. Out of this redefinition, Western culture is changing already into a symbol system unprecedented in its plasticity and absorptive capacity. Nothing much can oppose it really, and it welcomes all criticism, for, in a sense, it stands for nothing.
[66]CHAPTER 3
Community and Therapy
—such a price The Gods exact for song: To become what we sing. -Arnold, The Strayed Reveller
All symbols systems are therapeutic if they are compelling enough, and especially so if they serve to introduce a character ideal. Even the members of opposing schools will agree to this proposition. It is to the import of this agreement on a theory linking modern therapies and modern culture that this chapter will be devoted.
Freud himself considered it "justifiable to resort to more convenient methods of healing [than psychoanalysis] as long as there is any prospect of attaining anything by their means." We may consider, therefore, a typology of those means, including the psychoanalytic, as well as the difference of ends to be thus attained. By elucidating what was to be cured, we may come to understand some varieties of historical relationships between types of psychotherapy on the one hand and culture on the other.
From its classical origins, sociological theory was interested in the relation between that sense of well-being which defines the
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health of the individual and his membership in the community. Indeed, the former was considered dependent upon the latter. In order to produce the conditions of this dependence, philosophers have elaborated systems of symbolic integration, useful to the few or the many, varying in this respect with the level of symbolism elaborated. Being a Kantian, or Hegelian, may thus be integrative; and, being integrative, therapeutic. Moreover, what is philosophy for the few may be magic for the many. In general, all cultures have a therapeutic function, insofar as they are systems of symbolic integration-whether these systems be called religious, philosophical, ideological, or by any other name.
Among social theorists, Plato was the first to build his symbol system deliberately upon the integrative function. Indeed, his Republic is one such attempt to link the health and stability of the person to his place in a right social order. Only the examined life is worth living, according to Plato's mentor, Socrates; but, what is important to the purpose of this chapter is that Socrates, having examined his life, willingly sacrificed himself to the community. Later, in his own life, Plato was not at all willing to stop at the Socratic doctrine of the examined life. As E. R. Dodds pointed out, Plato held in his Laws that "the majority of human beings can be kept in tolerable moral health only by a carefully chosen diet of "incantations'-that is to say, edifying myths and bracing ethical slogans." What the superior and intelligent few may achieve through the examined life, the many must have achieved for them through education in "salutary" beliefs. Moral evil is equated, on the one hand, with psychological conflict and, on the other, with social conflict. The task of the theorist is to reduce this conflict: theory was to serve as a therapy. Conservative theorist-therapists from Plato to Jung have maintained a keen sense of what it is that really cures.
In Aristotle, man is naturally a citizen; the diagnosis of his psychological condition begins from this essential point. Whether a man can fully express his manhood, in every respect, depends upon his membership in the political community-and,
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first of all, on the existence of a community, which was defined by Aristotle as the "city-state." Only within the precincts of the city-state is there a field for the full exercise of those gifts and powers that make a man fully human and not a being crippled or arrested in his humanity. From Plato and Aristotle, through Burke and De Tocqueville, the therapeutic implication of social theory is remarkably consistent: an individual can exercise his gifts and powers fully only by participating in the common life. This is the classical ideal. The healthy man is in fact the good citizen. The therapeutic and the moral were thus connected in the Western tradition of social theory.
In the Middle Ages, this tradition was institutionalized in a church civilization, with the therapeutic functions reserved to functionaries of the churches. On the symbolic level, the integrative functions were expressed in doctrines such as that of natural law. Disagreement was largely about means, not ends. Through an elaborate mechanism of institutional authority, church civilization preserved those conventional understandings by which men hold together in communities, granting to the individual only a limited range of alternatives in belief and action. Where disagreement or ambiguity occurred, this church civilization resorted to authority figures-those who really did have the answers, in an official sense-who could resolve the conflict. Should one ask of the classical social theory: "What cures?" the answer will be frequently tantamount to the ques-tion: "Who cures?"
Ultimately, it is the community that cures. The function of the classical therapist is to commit the patient to the symbol system of the community, as best he can and by whatever techniques are sanctioned (eg., ritual or dialectical, magical or rational). All such efforts to reintegrate the subject into the communal symbol system may be categorized as "commitment therapies." Behind shaman and priest, philosopher and physician, stands the great community as the ultimate corrective of personal disorders. Culture is the system of significances attached to
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behavior by which a society explains itself to itself. A culture that is not thus self-explicative must be undergoing, in the measure of the negative condition, a profound change. 1
What happens, however, if the community itself is dis-ordered? Plato and his successors faced this question. They tried to construct models for a re-ordering of the community and, therewith, for that of a personal life worth living. They assumed that personal and moral perfection would go parallel with insight into the right social order. Yet, suppose there occurred some disorder so fundamental in nature as to destroy the therapeutic function of the community per se? Suppose, for a variety of examined reasons, the community were no longer able to supply a system of symbolic integration? Here, then, in the destruction of all idealizations upon which traditional and classical communities were based, in theory and practice, is to be sought the origin of modernity.
Of nineteenth-century social theorists, De Tocqueville is relevant here. Two others may be referred to here in an equally preliminary way: Rousseau and Marx. Rousseau tried to meet modern conditions by a polemical analysis of the community as a burden from which the individual had to free himself if he was to achieve a sense of well-being. To be a broken link in the chain of the community was the first requirement for being a therapist of the free individual. Not binding sentiment but critical detachment was the attitude most conducive to a sense of well-being. It is noteworthy how De Tocqueville took up this Rousseauean polemic and turned it around in his remarkable dissection of the Rousseauean doctrine of democratic individualism. Like his predecessors in the classical tradition, De Tocqueville was well aware of the specific connection between conditions of the psyche and the structure of society. In ages of equality, he remarks, the feelings of each man are turned toward himself alone. It is in ages of inequality that public spirit runs high, for
1 This is a book about one major aspect of culture change; I cannot undertake to examine here the relation between cultural and social change.
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only by transforming society can each man transform his own personal relations. As an aristocratic liberal trained in the classical tradition, De Tocqueville, like John Stuart Mill and liberals to this day, worried about what would happen to public life once individualism had sapped its virtues. For the individual would no longer feel committed to the "chain of all the members of the community." "Democracy," De Tocqueville concluded, "breaks that chain and severs every link of it." The individual is thus, in De Tocqueville's grand diagnosis, the defaulted citizen; he has cut off his feelings from communal affections. Individuals learn to feel that "they owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands." In a highly differentiated democratic culture, truly and for the first time, there arose the possibility of every man standing for himself, each at last leading a truly private life, trained to understand rather than love (or hate) his neighbor.
Within such privacies, can a man feel well? This question has been debated ever since the beginnings of modern social theory. The standard answer has been that he cannot. Such a life was "corrupt," defined by that term Socrates used in speaking to Crito, in analogy for organic corruption. he parts of an organism cannot be healthy if the whole was corrupt, and the whole cannot be but corrupt if the parts were not integrated positively into a whole. The view elaborated most thoroughly in our historic social theories, whatever their other differences, was that men were healthy only when they were good citizens. In short, security cured; and security came through membership in an "organic" community. This was the basis of conservative and radical political theory alike: community cures through the achievement by the individual of his collective identity. To cure a man, one need only return him to his community or construct a new one. By constructing dual communities, the philosophers of society were trying to cure themselves, first of all.
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To this should now be added the Marxist diagnosis, as a counter to both Rousseau and De Tocqueville: the community, Marx told us, has been destroyed and an impersonal cash nexus rules in its place. Men are being treated not as persons but as things. Marx's argument, as outlined in the Communist Mani-festo, is too familiar to bear repeating here. In the Marxist view, the old communal frame, within which men had found security, has now been destroyed. Marx's importance lies not merely in his diagnosis of the processes leading to that destruction, but primarily in his prophecy of a new form of community. Marxist diagnosis, without the Marxist ideal of a new community, would be not socialism but sociology. Marx's utopian vision of a Communist identity, predicate of true individuality, combines both the radical and conservative traditions. Marxism is more than theory; at the same time it is a type of commitment therapy.
It is now possible to move nearer to the main point of this survey. We have seen that in the classical tradition of social theory the sense of well-being of the individual was dependent on his full, participant membership in a community. The other traditional theory, also powerful and by now equally venerable, was that men must free themselves from binding attachments to communal purposes in order to express more freely their indi-vidualities. A third view entered at this point: that there is no positive community now within which the individual can merge himself therapeutically. Freud adheres to this third view. Indeed, if the theory developed in this volume is to define the relationship between therapy and culture, then it may be said that Freud came on the scene not long after a new type of therapeutic effort became necessary, that is, one suitable for the development of individualistic culture.
The older therapeutic efforts can be ordered, as suggested, under "therapies of commitment." Such therapies of commitment were characteristic of positive communities. By positive communities are meant those that offer some sort of salvation to the individual through participant membership.
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Ritual participation is an extreme form of commitment therapy. But, what ritual participation is to the group, mysticism is, functionally, to the individual. Operationally defined, mysticism is always a form of unification with a saving agency. The mystic inclines to achieve his self-awareness by coming as close to a condition of inaction as he can. Historically, Oriental moral demand systems such as Buddhism have exalted the mystic as a therapeutic type. The tendency to inaction itself has a supportive value, for once the mystical union with the saving symbol, and with the community that stands behind it, has been achieved, a climax of inner stability has been reached; there is no place to go further except down, so to speak, toward alienation from the integrative god-term with which the mystic has been infused.
Ecstatics constituted probably the first therapeutic type, communicating ecstatically their sense of release from established patterns of control to others. If the earliest religious leader was the ecstatic, then the first religious institution may have been the orgy. Understood thus, it may be said that faiths develop first as primary modes of release from earlier uses of faith, and then develop their own control functions.
The ascetic would be as characteristic of symbol systems in which the therapeutic function would be that of control as the ecstatic would be characteristic of systems with releasing tunc-tions. It is significant that asceticism in Roman Catholic doctrine is considered a propaedeutic to a mystical commitment experi-ence. But asceticism is not merely preparatory. It constitutes also a tie in its own right, binding the individual to the community or organization. The first organization men were ascetics: the clergy. Asceticism inclines the individual to a therapy of dedicated action, within which he can lose or limit his sense of individuality.
A culture will lose its therapeutic effect on the individual if it loses its primary power of integrating an individual under the sway of its communal purposes. An endemic individualism, such
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as that in the United States, whether doctrinally elaborated or not, may prevent a commitment therapy from taking full effect. Because of this preventive, long culturally dominant, another kind of therapeutic effort has become necessary, uniquely mod-ern, and different in kind from the classical therapies of commit-ment. This new attitude underlying the therapeutic effort may be termed "analytic." The chief and greatest of these therapies is the Freudian. The analytic therapy developed precisely in response to the need of the Western individual, in the Tocquevil-lean definition, for a therapy that would not depend for its effect on a symbolic return to a positive community ; at best, analytic therapy creates negative communities. The distinction between positive and negative communities, in the usage here intended, is as follows: positive communities are characterized by their guarantee of some kind of salvation of self; and by salvation is meant an experience which transforms all personal relations by subordinating them to agreed communal purposes; negative communities are those which, enabled to survive almost automatically by a self-sustaining technology, do not offer a type of collective salvation, and in which the therapeutic experience is not transformative but rather informative. Commitment therapies can prove efficacious only in positive communities; this type of therapy would also be transformative, as in various kinds of religious conversion, when the personality is supposed to undergo profound changes, so that even the name of the subject may be changed. This may happen, however, as we are aware, also in various secular revolutionary movements, and may include name-changing not merely as a means of deception but as a mark of profound inner change. Without salvational goals, action as such will become therapeutic.
Advanced industrial communities are no longer culturally positive. Under this general condition, controls must be established in a way other than that of transformative experiences. The ways suitable to modern culture are generally classifiable as "informative," aiming at a strengthening of ego-controls over
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inner conflicts. As a result, there emerges a more purely therapeutic type, complete with doctrines intended to manage the strains of living as a communally detached individual. The social type most obviously so detached is the intellectual. By our time, the detachment of the late nineteenth-century intellectual from a predominantly middle-class culture has been rendered general; the sight of vast numbers of middle-class intellectuals manqués is terrible indeed, and culturally self-destructive.
Within the analytic tradition there arise various strains and tensions, as one therapist after another makes an effort to combine the analytic with commitment therapy. Adlerian therapies are forms of return to community, as are Jungian therapies, though far more subtly so. Moreover, therapists such as Reich and Rosen actually attempted founding new communities, or make full use at least of the model therapeutic community of two. The chief moral implication of Freud's achievement will become apparent in this perspective of analytic therapies as contrasted to commitment therapies. Freud's genius is partly a matter of its appropriateness to his time. He developed the concept of the analytic therapy as a functional alternative to preceding commitment therapies, which by and large had become dysfunctional. The details of his psychoanalytic therapy bear out its informative and neutral, rather than transformative and committed, character. Analytic therapy appeals to persons living in an already highly individualistic and democratic culture, like the American. The mechanics of confirming and strengthening democratic individualism is best seen in two aspects of the analytic relationship: the transference and the fee.
The very basis of the transference is that it must be resolved. In no sense, moreover, is the therapist of the analytic school an exemplary man, as he inclines to be in commitment therapies. The analysand is to imitate the analyst only in his mature and calm detachment, and is to extend this attitude to the analyst himself. Yet, the analytic relationship is to serve as a model. In
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detaching himself from the analyst, the analysand will be learning that particular style of detachment in which his individuality can function within a greater range of alternatives and yet do so with a more conscious sense of personal limitations.
From the point of view of commitment therapies, by which we are still influenced, the analytic attitude of detachment is itself a symptom of illness. But Freud saw no alternative to a strengthening of the individual ego, for he lacked a constructive social theory and saw no therapeutically effective communities to which he could refer the patient in the post-analytic situation. However, the issue lies much deeper. A therapy so profoundly informative as the analytic may actually inhibit all transformative therapies. In some respects, the analytic therapy is patently anti-transformative, although it does support certain characteristics of the present individualistic culture. Thus, the monetary fee is considered a powerful weapon in therapy, precisely because it introduces an impersonal factor into what is otherwise a highly personal relation. Having paid, the patient has also discharged therewith his debt of gratitude to the therapist. By contrast, a disciple will always remain in debt to his mentor. Psychoanalysis may be a form of pedagogy, as Freud liked to consider it; but this pedagogy functions differently from its predecessors, and operates in a different phase of the Western psychohistorical process.
The analytic relationship is not always broken off. It is of some sociological interest that every analyst has been himself a patient, and may periodically become one again. The analyst-patient achieves something like a communal cosset by the very act of joining the professional community of analysts. This gives fresh significance to the standard notion that the analyst is a successfully analyzed patient. Moreover, we may now better understand the sociological import of a marked prolongation of analysis: whether due to increased knowledge or to other fac-tors, such prolongations may also be a strategy for retaining
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membership in that negative community of two in which the analytic relationship consists.
In summary, commitment therapies can be distinguished from analytic therapies. The latter arise in an historical period concomitant with the rise of democratic individualism. Commitment therapies, however, operate by returning the individual to the cosset of his natal community or by retraining him for membership in a new community, with a more effective pattern of symbolic integration; the therapeutic effort is transformative; the therapist is characteristically either a sacral or an exemplary figure. Analytic therapies, on the other hand, are uniquely modern and depend largely upon Freudian presuppositions. The therapeutic effort is not primarily transformative but informa-tive. The assumption of the analytic theory is that there is no positive community standing behind the therapist. The therapist, therefore, can be neither sacral nor exemplary, but is rather an analyst. The resolution of the transference relation circumscribes the modal relationships to which the patient may aspire in his extratherapeutic relations, lowering his erotic illusions to a level where he is less vulnerable to fixation and disappointment. In sociological terms, commitment therapies are authoritarian, whereas analytic therapies are anti-authoritarian. Moreover, commitment therapies tend to take on a sacramental symbolism; analytic therapies have an anti-sacramental bias.
It is the function of the sacralist to help both an individual and an entire community carry out their pledges to some communal purpose. In this sense the sacralist manages the artifacts that symbolize the cultural super-ego. All therapies of commitment involve a sacralist and those to whom the sacraments invented in that culture are administered. The sacralist cures, therefore, by recalling the individual to some principle of legitimacy, by reinforcing, through sacramental action, the cultural super-ego, and by re-enacting its internalization. He speaks for some corporate identity within which the individual can feel secure in his
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personal identity. The analyst, on the other hand, must deal with individuals beyond salvation, that is, beyond salvation through communal purposiveness. Therefore, the understanding of the individual's own authority is the final step in resolving a corporate identity that no longer serves to integrate the self.
Earlier therapists, being sacralists, guarded the cultural super-ego, communicating to the individual the particular signs and symbols in which the super-ego was embodied or personified. In this sense, earlier therapists assumed priestly powers. The modern therapist, however, is without priestly powers, precisely because he guards against the cultural super-ego and, unlike the sacralist, is free to criticize the moral demand system. Rather, he speaks for the individual buried alive, as it were, in the culture. To be thus freed from a tyrannical cultural super-ego is to be properly bedded in the present world. Analysis is not an initiation but a counter-initiation, to end the need for initiations. The modern therapeutic idea is to empty those meanings that link the individual to dying worlds by assents of faith for which his analytic reason tells him he is not truly responsible. In this way, by acts of interpretation, the sacred becomes symptom. Sacred images are, then, the visible form not of grace but of sickness. The sacralist yields to the analyst as the therapeutic functionary of modern culture.
Yet some moral revolutionaries sought a fresh sacramental language. D. H. Lawrence developed a language of sanctified sex, and so did Reich. Freud was, therefore, the truer revolu-tionary; in his doctrine, nothing is sacred, and certainly not sex.
Finally, in this chapter, a word should be said about the various forms of group therapy, including therapeutic commu-nities. Inevitably, group therapies develop sacramental modes of overcoming individual isolation. Group psychotherapy follows the form of commitment therapy without its doctrinal content. It is as if Wesley's famous classes continued to meet, for intense supportive discussions, without the basic conceptual scheme
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expressed in the theology, merely reaching out for temporary relief from the dialectic of despair and hope generated by the traditional culture.
In order to break this dialectic, new prophets have arisen, using the analytic attitude to accommodate hope in ways that the master of that attitude, Freud, had considered rather a mode of cultural religiosity, worshiping the releases instead of the controls, and therefore more a parody of the old consolations than a genuine advance beyond them. The following chapters will be devoted to the controversy between Freud and both the most conservative and most radical among his successor-critics. The final chapter will summarize the nature of those changes which have all but destroyed our inherited culture without having produced another to take its place.
[79]CHAPTER 4
In Defense of the Analytic Attitude
Nothing is indifferent in a matter of confession and abuse. —Flacius, On True and False Indifference
The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement is the best place at which to start reading, within the vast canon of Freud's work, his own defense of the analytic attitude against the doctrinaire therapeutics. This history is personal, the psychoanalytic movement is anatomized into Freud's own strengths and weaknesses, tested first against his own patience about the miseries of living and then against the impatience, before the same facts, of his chief disciples. Freud's motive for writing is simple: this is a work of determined self-interest, to exclude, on his own terms, those among his disciples who had already departed on terms he could no longer permit to be theirs. The writing is almost cruel in its clarity about persons and in its pregnant brevity; Freud leaves out no essentials, includes no irrelevancy. The History is a masterpiece of polemic.
Driven by what he considered a threat to his creation, Freud thus composed a partisan introduction to the development of his mind: first, in the lonely years until 1902; second, from 1902 until 1910, during the ascendancy of his mind over others less
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great but exceedingly good, attracted as they were originally by their sense of Freud's intellectual greatness.
Must personal supremacy follow from intellectual greatness? At least where a movement described the trajectory of one man's mind, as did the psychoanalytic, such a conjunction-and the effort to break it-seems inevitable. By 1910, two of Freud's chief disciples, Adler and Jung, had planted what he believed to be sterile flowers, cut from his new tree of knowledge. There-fore, Freud's proprietary interest in the movement coincided exactly with his jealousy for truths originally his own. He had "possessed" these truths, as he put it once-inadvertently, it seems. He was not about to share the object of his vigilant passion with any who did not see it as he had created it. Part Three of the History is the purest polemic, a surgical dismemberment of Adler's political need and Jung's religious one.
In polemics, as in sport, the best defense is a good offense. Although the History is Freud's most polemical work, it is not ugly, as are most polemics. Freud was not a disputatious man. He defended himself by explaining the development of his own thought; he attacked by explaining, no less accurately, the development of the thoughts of his opponents. That thoughts are carried by men, vulnerable precisely in their possessiveness, makes all such comparisons polemical. Freud would not suffer the false civility of separating ideas from men. In the end, it is clear that Adler and Jung wrote as they did because they were as they were. Of course, Freud applies the same standard to himself. It was from the darkness of his own inner life that he set out upon his immortal distraction.
He poked around in the darkness for a lifetime, driving out ugly little terrors here and there but never pretending to find some adjuratory formula against them. He thought Adler and Jung had worked out formulae of commitment for which he was partly responsible. The History is dedicated to the absolution of himself from this responsibility.
Intellectual questions soon shade off into questions of organi-
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zation. For this reason, Freud's defense of the analytic attitude was institutional as well as polemical. Here the two sides-ideas and men—are treated as one. And so should they be; there is no moral and no meaning in any culture if not in the conviction that men cannot live and work agreeably together, however good their avowed intentions, unless they share in the same basic stock of ideas. Consensus is the basis of every society, including the scientific. Freud knew this; he had no alternative except to try to organize into a movement those men who had come under the influence of his ideas.
The efforts to describe psychoanalysis as a strange cross between science and sectarianism miss the point: every science has its canon, an established body of knowledge from which students learn, upon the validity of which depend their own chances of extending and advancing knowledge beyond the given limits of the canon. Moreover, every science has its established body of authoritative makers of opinion, the cadre of men empowered to organize ideas into dogma. Students of physics do not advance in knowledge by arguing all over again about the elements of nature, beginning with Thales' fourfold division into earth, air, fire, and water. They begin where their masters in the subject stand. Every science, like every teaching church, must have its dogmatists; otherwise, all questions would be forever first questions-and forever remain unanswerable.
This is not to say that dogma does not alter; dogmatists do change their minds. But there must be some basic level of consensus upon which the members can test the nature and extent of their disagreement. Freud was not holding on forcibly to Adler (who, in effect, denied the unconscious) or Jung (who, in effect, denied the sexuality of libido); on the contrary, Freud suggested to them, and to their followers, that the disagreements between them were now so fundamental that they ought not any longer call themselves his, Freud's, disciples. In the second part of this chapter, we shall examine the question whether Freud's resort to polemic was justified by the depth of
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his disagreement with his former disciples. In the third and final part, we shall briefly consider the movement Freud launched as a carrier for his own ideas, and question whether, in its present phase, that movement is capable of using the intellectual vitality with which it was endowed.
By January, 1914, when Freud sat down to write his History, a great part of the psychoanalytic canon had already been established, all by the hand of one man, Freud himself. It is as if Paul had composed the entire New Testament; or, more aptly, as if Moses had compiled the entire Pentateuch. After 1901, the disciples gathered in Freud's own home, at first rather informally. At the suggestion of Freud's former patient, Wilhelm Stekel, the group constituted itself as the "Psychological Wednesday Even-ings," to read papers and educate each other in the psychoanalytic discipline. Thus the canon was to be learned and extended.
Freud did not aspire to exclusive authorship, or even exclusive leadership. His supremacy derived from sheer intellectual superiority and not from any ambition to rule this small group. His own work was not even half done, and collaborators were needed, not only for empirical and therapeutic but for theoretical work. Nevertheless, the theory was well launched, the canon already a huge achievement, which, Freud was convinced, needed secondary elaboration but not primary change. He recognized that his ideas would have to be contained in some kind of social organization, to prevent confusion as his influence spread, so that some intellectual authority could "admonish and instruct" as necessary. Adler and Jung were his first two candidates for the leadership of the movement, Adler locally in Vienna, Jung for the movement as a whole.
Freud would have preferred to remain behind the scenes, the leader of leaders, and thus stay free from purely organizational distractions, the more free thus to pursue those ideas for the sake
1 Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, ed. H. Nunberg and E. Federn, transl. M. Nunberg (New York, 1962), I (1906-08), p. xviii.
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of which the organization existed. It was Freud's intellectual ascendancy that made him the leader of a movement intensely personal in character. To challenge him intellectually within the movement amounted to challenging him personally. Confronted by such challenges, Freud used his writing to establish a superior loneliness. Studies in Hysteria, written in joint authorship with Breuer in 1895, was to be his last collaborative effort. The head of the movement worked best alone. Intellectually he was always a loner, socially he wished to be joined. Such temperaments must try to found organizations dedicated to their ideas. In this sense, Freud was intolerant of disagreements. "We possess the truth," he once remarked; "I am sure of it." The phrase is passionate in a sense that Freud might be expected to have recognized. He had fallen in love with a coarse Galatea, whom others before him adored but rarely studied. And he worked upon her, refining his knowledge of the impossible creature until almost the day of his death. Freud's passion, and his discovery of its object, was a personal necessity. He had "only unwillingly taken up the profession of medicine"; in fact, Freud had a low opinion of the intelligence of doctors. They were merchants, trading in the mitigation of miseries they scarcely attempted to understand. This intellectual passion of his life, surfacing late as it did, when he was nearly forty, saved him from careerism and the superficiality of success. He had the courage to find, in his own suffering, "a strong motive for helping [others'] suffering." His profoundest success was the creation of an intellectual patchwork of genius rather than that of a unified doctrine.
Not only the quality of Freud's mind but the quantity of his output was overwhelming. His first colleagues must have felt some panic at the steady acceleration of Freud's originality, which, while carrying them along, stimulated and yet frustrated their analogous desires. Interpretation of Dreams appeared in 1900; The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in 1901; Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious in 1905; Three Essays on Sexuality in 1905; Delusions and Dreams in 1907; "Civilized
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Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness" in 1908; the "Anal-ysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy" in 1909; Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis in 1910; Da Vinci also in 1910; "Two Principles of Mental Functioning" in 1911; "The Dynamics of the Transference" in 1912; "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love" and Totem and Taboo also in 1912; "The Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis" in 1913. I have given here only some representative examples taken from among the important writings of these years.
Although Freud took pride (rather too much pride, it seems) in being uncontentious, he knew how to fight. To defend the analytic attitude, he takes the reader by the hand and gives him a lesson in the proper conduct of controversy. Freud made a distinction between what is worth arguing about and what is not. This fact or that takes on importance only from the analytic line along which the facts are strung out. Although Freud fought the rise of new theorists in his own movement, the first lesson to be learned from his defense of an incomplete legacy has little to do with the empirical content of the argument but rather with its theoretical form. Against his own cautionary advice, and against the prejudice of the time, Freud reasserted the primacy of theory in any debate on the meaning of the facts.
Theory is God's gift to both the timid and the daring. Moreover, it is often hard to say who is timid, who is daring. A theory can be used to kill facts or create them. A theoretician is the artificer of reality. But a theoretician cannot simply inherit his sense of the real from dead predecessors. Freud's first col-laborator, Breuer, subscribed to the dead theory of nineteenth-century medicine: that all disease entities may be traced back ultimately to some material cause. Yet, somehow, that material or physical cause is never quite found, or (what amounts to the same thing) the data never get quite completely collected. Rather than face up to the inner logic of his own observations, Breuer resorted to another dead theory, that of "hypnoid
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states," to explain hysteria. In his insistence on conceptualizing misery in terms of material properties, Breuer refused to face the facts. He needed to imagine something physical, "unassimilated foreign bodies," like invisible worms that fly through the night, landing on the psyche and agitating it. Without his defenses of dead materialistic theory, Breuer felt unsafe. Realizing that the safe theory led to an empirical dead-end, Freud decided to proceed beyond it. He would, he wrote ironically, treat the matter "less scientifically." Thus, daring to transform reality into a truer shape, Freud imagined the "repressions," which at first he had called, with almost equal precision, the "defenses." Facts apparently dead immediately sprang to life. Freud's theoretical daring had produced the predicates of change in the psychohistorical process; the one miracle human beings are obliged to perform, and which is really within their power, to change their basic self-interpretation, Freud performed.
Although Freud denied the divine, he did not deny his own divine capacity-to theorize. Before theorizing was distinguished from theologizing, to theorize was considered a way of seeing God. Now it is considered merely a necessity, something men are compelled to do if they are to become godlike. The alternative to creator-theories is well known, and evident especially in the social sciences nowadays: dead theories which merely arrange and rearrange the chaos of facts without bringing them to life, and so, even as the facts are collected, hide them from our understanding and render them inaccessible to our will.
There are two theories of theory. The first, and earlier, asserts that theory is the way in which "what ought to be" establishes its hegemony over "what is." Value and truth are inseparable; thus is content specified, a fact put in its place. Theory is the reflecting mirror of man's mind, catching glimpses of an order eternally right and good. In this first tradition of our culture, which continued unbroken until the time of Francis Bacon, there could be disagreement on the means of bringing mankind
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to conform to the eternal and stable order of things as they really are, but not on the ends. Things being what we know them to be, the intellectual and emotional task of life is to make our actions conform to the right order, so that we too can be right. Theoretical knowledge is therefore of the good; the ideal is therefore most real, the model from which the is-ness of things, in their splendid variety, derives. Theory is the way of understanding the ideal. In this theory of theory, knowledge finally emerges, at its highest level, as faith; the best life is that of true obedience. God is the final object of all classical theorizing; to contemplate God in the unity above all the variety manifested in His natural and social orders (or moral commandments), was the highest good.
But there is a second theory of theory, one that arose both as a response to the death of the gods and also as a weapon for killing off those surviving, somehow, in our moral unconscious and cultural conscience. In this second and more recent tradition of theorizing, theory arms us with the weapons for transforming reality instead of forcing us to conform to it. The transformative cast of theorizing, unlike the conformative cast, is silent about ultimate ends. In the absence of news about a stable and governing order anywhere, theory becomes actively concerned with mitigating the daily miseries of living rather than with a therapy of commitment to some healing doctrine of the uni-verse. In fact, the universe is neither accepted nor rejected; it is merely there for our use. In the second tradition, theory at its highest reach is not faith but, rather, power. A good theory becomes the creator of power. And from that creation of power derives man's freedom to choose among the options specified by the reach of potential powers laid down in the theory.
Psychoanalytic theory belongs to the second tradition. Marx-ism, too, belongs to the second tradition. Marx aimed at the increase of human power on the assumption that, in the access of freedom which follows upon power, man will know how to choose-that is, he will conduct his life in a better way, with less
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narrowing of the range of alternative activities now theoretically presented to him.
It is at this point that we must return to Freud, and to his antagonists Adler and Jung. For, in their different ways, both Adler and Jung sought in psychoanalysis a total theory, to which a patient could commit himself wholly. But all such therapies of commitment belong to the religious category of cure: that of souls. More modestly, Freud sought to give men that power of insight which would increase their power to choose; but, he had no intention of telling them what they ought to choose. He wanted merely to give men more options than their raw experience of life permitted. Where experience im-poverished, Freud would enrich, and do so by interpreting the meaning of their impoverishing experience, thus reversing its effector, at least, mitigating it. Masters of their personal ex-perience, men would acquire the power to choose, in a limited way, the range of their obedience to the dictates of experience. To make men do less harm than they might otherwise do was the limit of Freud's ambition. He had no interest in creating a doctrine of the good life, nor one of the good society. This lack of interest in such doctrines, taken alone, is enough to distinguish him from the classical tradition of social theory.
Freud's object was personal capacity, not general cure. More-over, one will not lead to the other. Cure is a religious category. The distinction Freud made between the increase of the freedom to choose, which he considered the proper object of theory and therapy, on the one hand, and cure, on the other, which belongs to another world of theory, had created a fundamental confusion among his followers, which Freud himself was helpless to control or resolve. Adler and Jung sought, each in his own way, a cure, while Freud, knowing there was no cure, in the classical sense of a generalizable conversion experience, sought an increase in human power without reference to any of the established ideals. It must follow, then, that both Adler and Jung
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would come round either to denying the very existence of the unconscious (Adler) or to a version of the unconscious that really gave it the function of the ideal and eternal order, as in the older mode of theorizing (Jung). Without quite realizing what they were doing, both Adler and Jung rushed beyond Freud's doctrine of personal capacity into religious aspirations to reinterpret man as a whole and thus cure him in his entirety. Their failures draw the limit of Freud's success: the greater freedom to choose does not cure anybody-in the sense in which, for millennia, Western man has yearned to be cured.
No less moved by the misery of living than was Freud, Jung chose to return to a religious cure of souls, carrying back with him some psychoanalytic apparatus. Even though Jung admitted the difference in purpose, Freud never forgave Jung for this improper use of his theory. In the History, Freud slaps him hard on the back and sends him on his way, back to the invisible church of his fathers, from which, as it turned out in the years that followed, Jung could wander far but never entirely escape.?
Jung's aim was to reach a new compromise between the patient and his sufferings, which are individuated representations of a permanent and superior spiritual order. In the very symbols from which Freud had wanted to free mankind, Jung saw the principle of salvation. Sickness was indeed a form of misunder-standing. Jung could see, transparent through the neuroses, the order of man's health.
Such profound optimism can fairly be called religious. Jung transposed the forms and figures of earlier systems of symbolism into psychology. His diagnoses are pseudo-visions-but visions nonetheless. For visionaries never see more directly than through the symbolism by which they are troubled. To cure, in the Jungian theory, is to give the patient peace in adhering to the
2 Freud never understood the questionable sense in which Jung remained a Christian (see Chap. 5). Jung sought an analytic symbolism that could halt deconversion as thé central experience of the mature Western personality. The ensuing conversion experience need not necessarily be Christian.
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eternal order, replicated within him symbolically. Neurotic action is then one among two possible lines of interpretation. The task of the therapist is to help the patient choose the ascendant rather than the descendant line. By re-adapting the patient to his dominant archetypes, Jung helps him neutralize the neurotic component in them.
There is a fine distinction between adapting the archetypes to one's own purposes and adapting one's purposes to the arche-types. Jungian therapy grows hortative in either mode; both are efforts at reaching agreement with an assumed eternal order, differently expressed in different cases. It is as if, because men are ill, gods exist. Freud risked the correlative implication: that healthy men need no gods. The age prefers its religiosities psychologized, one way or the other. Although Jung himself is less read than argued against, the Jungian position has filtered through, its elements broadcast chiefly by the literary gentry who have succeeded to the preaching function of the pastors. The "God above God" of our theological symbolists (e.g., Paul Tillich) reflects, in tepid holy water, the "man below man" of our psychoanalytic instinctualists, unintentionally set loose by Freud.
Freud's intellectual victory over Jung, though clear-cut, was not lasting. Perhaps the need for cure is too urgent, and all theories of cure too useful. As new religions are constantly being born, so psychotherapeutic faiths are constantly breaking out of their clinical restrictions. Freud's refusal to become a prophetic healer could not be permanently imposed upon all sections of his movement. But no one has succeeded in converting psychoanalytic doctrine into a cure of souls, although many have tried. What Adler and Jung did-and what Reich, Rank, Horney, Fromm, et al., and the Existentialist analysts did after them-is patently not psychoanalysis. Freud insisted on keeping the differences intact. He did not deny that the cures others might
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develop may be efficacious modes of therapy. Many agencies have been known to mitigate suffering, and the chief of these is faith, in the systemic cultural sense used in this volume.
For that matter, to the religious all religions have a therapeutic function. They reflect a symptomatic character only to the indifferent. Freud proposed that all those who wanted to cure souls, or preach a saving idea, do so under a banner other than his own. Since psychoanalysis is an anti-religion, treating religion always in its symptomatic character, its efforts could only be confused if religious psychologists continued to call themselves psychoanalysts.
Yet, even among some of the oldest and most eminent ana-lysts, there has been felt a need for a therapy of commitment; these included some of the best minds in the movement. Perhaps the freedom to choose is not therapeutic enough. Finally, the content of the choice itself must be recommended, if not pre-scribed. Men want to be secured. Moreover, only in a secure symbolic can they bear to know themselves. This is the strong point at which Jungian therapy arrived.
Intellectually superior to Jung as he was, Freud grossly underestimated his disciple. He permitted his own sense of superior intelligence to obscure the equalizing effect of the issue between them. With his doctrine of archetypes, Jung offered a pantheon of psychologized god-terms, from which men could choose their spiritual medicine. In subjecting all images of a superior order to psychoanalytic doubt ("I am dependent, therefore I am imma-ture"), Freud limited severely the range of the therapeutic effect of his superior insight.
Freud's was a sheer triumph of intellectuality, of detachment. And yet he could not quite confront the issue to which Jung pointed, however unsteadily: the content of the choices that mankind would be freed to make. The Jungian doctrine develops into a formal argument for the inevitability of faith. The neuroses themselves are badly translated symbols of the gods. Thus, Jung is the ultimate theodicist, converting the universal
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sickness of the human spirit into intimations of individual health.
As a theodicist, Jung had to sublimate psychoanalysis itself, altering it to a general cure of souls, without committing it to one or another historical religion but, rather, making it available in the service of all. Tracing the way in which the motives of "erotic instinctual forces" are transformed into representations of the "highest ethical and religious interests of man," Jung attempted a reversal, so as to show how the erotic forces were themselves representations of the highest ethical and religious motives. Was this religion or analysis? Freud thought he knew the answer. The Jungian mode of psychoanalyzing was a "new message of salvation . .. a new Weltanschauung for every-one." Analysis offered an anti-message, for the few.
Even as a fresh thrust of religious psychology, Jungian theory is dangerous, first of all to the integrity of the religious them-selves. Jung's doctrine is far more heretical than Freud's when examined from either the Christian or the Jewish point of view. In Freud's approach, the delicate foundations of mankind's ethical and religious interests are at least explored and the attractive dangers to religiosity from the instincts made clear. By understanding religiosity as instinctual per se, Jung may be doing religion the disservice of giving it a false sense of security. That fantasy is not the revelatory language of faith is a proposition to be explored in the following chapter. Here it may be enough to say that Jung's is too natural a religion-so natural, in fact, that it can scarcely serve the purpose of any particular historic faith.
Theologians might well reconsider, therefore, who is more dangerous: Freud or Jung. Better a forthright enemy than an untrustworthy friend. Jung's psychological religiosity is too strictly for therapeutics, those for whom a god is the need of needs. Freud declared that God did not exist-and identified Him as the universal figure of authority. I am not sure whether one should not prefer Freud's strong nonexistent God to Jung's weak existent one. Freud knew how tenuous was Jung's religious psychology, but was not capable of launching a systematic
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criticism of it. Or, perhaps (wrongly, it seems) he did not consider Jung's work worth the critical shot.?
No longer grasping the issue between psychoanalysis and a cure of souls, many now are entering analysis innocently, as though it were a part of their quest for "meaning" and "iden-tity," and do so often with the encouragement of restive members within the psychoanalytic movement itself. It is sad to witness their disappointment, even their bitterness: after years of analysis, these patients have not found what they were looking for; they have taken the wrong cure, so far as they do not understand that there is no cure at all. In consequence, there are new polemicists stalking Freud throughout the land, loudly saying that he cannot "cure" —when such a cure in the earlier cultural sense was never his object.
On the proposition that psychoanalysis does not cure in a sense that interests them, the more enlightened among the religious grow embarrassed; for, in their efforts at reconciliation between psychoanalysis and religion, they have attempted to incorporate Freud in a way that will render his doctrine harmless and their own intellectually more powerful.
There may be yet another reason for the way Freud has been partially incorporated now by the religious: in this way, with apparent safety, they can express now the unconscious ambivalence of their own religious rhetoric of "commitment." Lacking confidence in their inherited stock of insight, the religious prefer to avoid argument in a wordy torrent of good will. Correlatively, in a weakening grasp of their own subject, psychoanalysts are more and more inclined to treat Freud's irreli-gion as if it were a personal aberration no more relevant to psychoanalysis than Freud's puritanism or his passion for cigars. Thus do the psychoanalytic and the religious talk merrily past one another, making hash of two inherently antagonistic lega-
3 This is one way of interpreting his use of the quotation from Goethe with which Part III of the History begins: "Mach es kurz! Am jüngsten Tag ist's nur ein Furz!"
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cies. When psychoanalysis frees a patient from the tyranny of his inner compulsions, it gives him a power to choose that is not otherwise his. Thus, the aim of psychoanalysis is the aim of science-power; in this case a transformative technology of the inner life. Where science is, there technology will be. This ultimate technology aims at increasing the range of choice. Yet, without a parallel range of god-terms from which choices may be derived and ordered, choice itself may become a matter of indifference or man will become a glutton, choosing everything. There is no feeling more desperate than that of being free to choose, and yet without the specific compulsion of being chosen. After all, one does not really choose; one is chosen. This is one way of stating the difference between gods and men. Gods choose; men are chosen. What men lose when they become as free as gods is precisely that sense of being chosen, which encourages them, in their gratitude, to take their subsequent choices seriously. Put in another way, this means: Freedom does not exist without responsibility.
There may be a final solution to this absurdity of being freed to choose and then having no choice worth making. Psychoanal-ysis, once merged with technologies of the emotions (neo-Pavlovian, in the main), may help eliminate man's two most troublesome aspirations: toward freedom and faith. A marriage between Pavlovian or Behaviorist learning theory and Freud's might lead to that control of the unconscious which would eliminate the residues of religious compulsion, on the one hand, and the freedom to choose, on the other. The unconscious controlled, compulsion and choice would fuse. Science aspires to increase the freedom of choice, but science ends, as it must, in a technique of power. Already, some restive analysts talk of "controlling the variables" responsible for our patterns of personal relations.
Adler's therapy, too, was essentially one of commitment. The patient was salvaged by the completeness with which his simple
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theory enclosed his complex motives. As Freud put it, Adler looked for a way at "one stroke to explain the behavior and character of human beings." As with Jung, Freud could bring Adler only so far along the road to an anti-doctrine. Originally, both had joined Freud so as to find a new supreme cure, and when he surprised them by offering the supremacy of intelligence instead, their days of allegiance to him were numbered, although neither they nor Freud could have been expected to realize it at the time. Both Adler and Jung wanted to take psychoanalysis out of the consulting room, where Freud insisted that it must be kept. Yet Freud, too, found himself regularly tempted to venture outside. He disliked the doctor game, and used the consulting room not least as a convenient base of operations upon the entire culture. One mutually wounding difference between Freud and the first schismatics is, rather, that Freud ardently desired to avoid having his insights locked into a system. It is within the cosset of a symbol system that people can ease their minds in the security of a complete explanation. Freud, however, specifically wanted to protect his patients from merging therapy with an adherence to his doctrine. There is the technique of the transference and the overcoming of resistances, but transference must be resolved if the analysis is to be brought to a conclusion useful to the patient.
Commitment, on the other hand, is a system of rationalization where therapeutic ideas serve both to exploit and to hide unconscious motives. Translating Freud's insights into a doctrinally inflexible psychology of power, Adler thus compromised with the fact that he was a doctor; psychoanalysis served the func-tion, for him, of a neurotic symptom, complying with the demands of his ego to express his political preferences. Thus, originally, Freud offered Adler some advantage, an exciting alternative to his social interests. But Adler could not fend off for long the main interest of his life, the construction of a social ideology. It is possible that, as a socialist, Adler remade psychoanalysis into a doctrine of power as a way of rationalizing his
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own acute sense of powerlessness, rather as neurotics accept their anxiety as a means of attaining a kind of security. He could not long tolerate analysis that stopped short of advocacy. And so, after a few years during which he impatiently played the analytic game, Adler experienced the personal satisfaction of finding the "sole motive force" of life.
With his dynamically balanced capacities for elaborating multiple analytic perspectives, Freud never chased the chimera of a sole motive force. Adler's passion for finding what he called a "guiding line," a master doctrine, was the precise opposite of what Freud had trained himself to achieve: to tolerate uncertainty and always entertain multiple analytic perspectives until, in the cruel competition of ideas, some few survived. Adler thus translated Freud's intricate intellectual enterprise into a psychological ethic of competition, preserving only half of it, and that part only which analyzes the "jealous narrowness of the ego" making use of the instinct to struggle for power; but, the other half, that in which the instincts oppose the ego, was outside the range of Adler's polemical interest and, therefore, beyond his understanding. The need of Adler's own ego, to politicize every-thing, was reflected in his ego psychology. Freud, on the other hand, was one of those rare characters who needed no therapy of commitment. It is in this special sense that he is the most unheroic of intellectuals, free from compelling temptations toward either politics or religion. He is, in fact, the embodiment of the modern intellectual as a type-for he was nothing more than an intellectual; he was not even a "mental healer," as Stefan Zweig mistakenly labeled him, depending on models of cure (Mary Baker Eddy, Tolstoy, et al.) repugnant to the analytic attitude.
Some modern psychologies are themselves the surrogates of political theory, as others are the surrogates of theology. The feeling of "organ inferiority," which Adler so easily discovered as the core of neurotic behavior, may be interpreted as his transliteration into psychological terms of the class war. The
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weak, ugly, misshapen, crippled, miserable-these were Adler's own, privately designated proletariat, whom he set out to cure of their inferiority complex. Viewed thus, Adler's psychology reveals the quality of his socialism; it was, said Freud, characterized by (1) protest, and (2) self-assertion, the aggrandizement of personality. Here is a sudden swoop down into the very bowels of the socialist dynamic, with its inevitable cult of personality wherever it triumphs. Understood psychoanalyti-cally, socialism is the child of capitalism, rebelling against a father whom it must closely resemble. Freud closes his comment on Adler with a fatal criticism of psychological socialism: "The view of life which is reflected in the Adlerian system is founded exclusively on the aggressive impulse; there is no room in it for love. It might surprise one that such a cheerless view of life should meet with any attention at all."
Freud raked the Adlerian system in search of a "single new observation." But Adler was interested in constructing a political psychology, not in adding to the superabundance of facts. For Adler, as later for Rank, truth is a matter of achieving therapeutically useful opinions. Thus, Adler was one of the "modern Messiahs," as Freud called them, who proclaim the "relativity of all knowledge" -except their own. At the same time, Freud defended his apparent conservatism against Jung's then self-proclaimed mission to the young, as their liberator from the fathers. As it has happened, Jung completed a full circle, from a psychology of tradition to a traditionalist psychology. This dialectic was already forecast in his early refusal to deal with what he called "distasteful" matters, for example, sex.
Freud takes a final, parting shot at both Adler and Jung: "The theological prehistory of [Jung] throws no less light on his attitude to psychoanalysis than does Adler's socialist prehistory on the development of his psychology." Both used their psychologies to stabilize their own ambivalent relations to their own faiths. Adler's individual psychology is a mean socialism; Jung's
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archetypes are a museum of gods—for educated tourists who enjoy visiting noble, quiet old edifices that once housed noisily worshiping communities. Socialists and Christians adopt either psychology at their peril. Indeed, too many among our emotional socialists suffer from a barely repressed love for competitive behavior, while our Christians are a little too satisfied in their admission to other less covert god-haters that gods must be crucified in order to be resurrected.
Freud erred, I think, in considering the Adlerian case more important than Jung's. It is true that Adlerian motifs can be found in contemporary ego psychology, and that Adler has had some influence on what is, after social work, intellectually the shoddiest field in the academic world-educational psychology. But ambivalent socialism has nothing like the cultural importance of ambivalent religiosity. Jung's psychological religiosity is the very opposite of the real thing; yet, being opposite, it may be more nearly the real thing than Freud's decided non-religion. Jung's is a religious doctrine in which God is rendered completely interior. The "Thou" term becomes a function of the "I." In this way, as Freud rightly concludes, with condemnatory implication, a "new religio-ethical system has been created." But Freud did not notice how strenuously this religio-ethical system opposed its predecessors-more strenuously even than his own analytic attitude.
Analysis can never be combined with "cure," in the sense established by the ascetic culture. Jung tried analysis but, given his purposes, he moved on to a psychological symbolism that admonished and instructed rather than analyzed and, in so doing, aimed at restoring something all but lost to modern life. Freud aimed at making man strong enough to come to a working agreement with his inner nature, through an analysis which neither admonished nor instructed. When successful, Freud left the inner man more free, but did so without that compelling
4 In which neither God the Father nor His Son has any preferred place.
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symbol system which is the model of Jungian therapy. One may admire Jung's ambition; even more, one may admire Freud's mind. Faith is better than knowledge if it works; but knowledge is better if faith be only an escape from knowledge.
It may be said that Jung's faith in faith cannot compete intellectually with the brilliant specificity of Freudian analysis. On the other hand, the aim of psychoanalysis may be too modest even to maintain its original strength. For, inevitably, at a certain point of societal power, knowledge seeks to transform itself into faith. To stop far short of that point may, in time, paralyze the very knowledge that is being preserved. Freud's successors know less and less because their knowledge, uninspired by that passion to find faith with which it must merge in order to fulfill its potential of power, is not taking them anywhere except where Freud has already been. The act of knowledge can become as mechanical and ritualized as the act of faith. Both are subject to the same dreadful specifically contemporary risk of becoming banal. In the last analysis, a leap of faith may be necessary, if the patient is to be free to choose-and to choose because his knowledge, being personal, compels him thus. The hardest lesson to learn is not how to choose but rather how to acquire that passionate knowledge which will permit us again to be chosen. In this sense, Jung represents the uncertain and confused renewal of an effort toward personal knowledge that is also, at the same time, faith. Jung is not quite so ludicrous, therefore, as Glover, in his exceptionally open bout of malice, 5 makes him out to be.
Much of Freud's polemical writing is so superior to that of his opponents that it takes on the character of a totem feast, in which the most powerful sons are carved up in swift clean
5 E. Glover, Freud or Jung? (New York, 1956). Jung understood himself as the advocate of the "mythic man" against the uncomprehending "scientific man." But, "to the intellectual, all my mythologizing is futile speculation." See C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (London, 1963), p. 279.
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strokes, the father meanwhile justifying his action at every stroke. By sheer sharpness of execution, Freud succeeded in intimidating the weaker sons. Those post-Freudian analysts who remain orthodox never have had that healthy bout of rebellion which sharpens orthodoxy; it is as if Augustine had been born a bishop. Nowadays, the world is full of tame Christians; in consequence, the churches are empty of life, if not of people. The psychoanalytic movement trains tame Freudians and, in consequence, few sons remain who are worthy of the father.
Freud's intellectual superiority has bequeathed to his followers an unearned wealth of insight over which they cannot but quarrel; the psychoanalysts are, intellectually, a rentier class and, like all rentier classes, even when they prosper it is in a defensive mood. Not that the decline of the movement in intellectual power can be blamed entirely on the sons; perfectly mature sons, fully grown, would look the smaller when standing next to a father of such abnormal height. The comparison must be invidious and need not be made. It would be equally pointless to compare Moses with the Jews in restive attendance at their suburban synagogues. Like all ideas, and the institutions by which they are objectified, psychoanalysis is subject to the vicissitudes of its history. The faith of Israel is one thing in eleventh-century North Africa, another thing in twentieth-century America-though there are resemblances. The problems addressed by the psychoanalytic movement are one thing in Vienna at the turn of the century, another thing in Beverly Hills today-though there are resemblances.
It was the opinion of Karl Marx that history likes to make bad jokes during its second swing around. The psychoanalysts are vulnerable to bad jokes; they do important work, and it is possible that, in their busy professional routines, some of them have stopped thinking hard enough about what they are doing. Priesthoods have their rituals, psychoanalysts their clinical formulae (schizophrenia is now in, and hysteria out). But ritual is the proper function of priests; the formulae of the analysts more
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nearly resemble the canned sermons of the ministers, made in Detroit, or somewhere, especially for this Sunday. Freud gave out no formula. Orthodoxy, in the pejorative sense, kills a living theory. It is significant that Freudian theory is most alive today outside the professional confines of psychoanalytic medicine, among some historians, critics, philosophers, and in the social sciences.
It is regrettable that psychoanalysis began as a branch of medicine. It is true, the first psychoanalytic organization, which gathered weekly at Freud's home, consisted of many doctors who were looking for a way out of the straitjacket of medical practice, but it included also schoolteachers, musicologists, students in search of their subject, and just downright intelligent people. Nor did Freud ever desire his subject to become a medical specialty; on this crucial point of "lay analysis," it was the American branch of the movement which defeated him, after a long and strenuous battle. In fact, the major defeats Freud suffered were always from inside his own movement, rather than from without. He could cope with enemies; his friends defeated him.
The declining intellectual vitality of the psychoanalytic movement is in part due to structural defects in the movement, in part to defaults of memory; the analysts choose to neglect lessons they once had learned from Freud. The two parts are not unconnected.
Probably the principal way in which the psychoanalytic movement defeated its revered founder-the more defeated, the more revered-was by the false legitimation of the medical degree. The M.D. is, at best, gratuitous; psychoanalysts are not medical doctors. But the absorption of psychoanalysis under the medical rubric has opened the door that Freud once had closed so decisively: to a resurgence of physiological and materialist models-dead theory. Freud settled this issue when he parted from Breuer on the theory of "hypnoid states" and other such physicalist categories. But materialist medicine has returned to
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charm the Freudians in a new disguise, parading now as the ambition to quantify and measure. Poorly educated as they are and, like ministers, intimidated by anything labeled "science," psychoanalysts are too easily impressed with one or another kind of methodological nostrum. Nowadays, some psychoanalysts are even toying with the theory of neurosis being a failure of communications systems within the psyche, a disjunction between affective "input" and "output." Such a scientific regression may occur in any discipline that does not insist upon mastery of its own historical development. A social science that refuses to remember its founders will not realize when it is being silly or repetitious. Now, unchallenged by Freud's personal authority and flashes of insight, materialist dogma parades confidently as scientific progress. Old verities become new variables, jargon makes a mystery of the obvious.
The decline of the intellectual caliber of the psychoanalytic movement can be related to secondary structural defects derived from the primary defect of its being a quasi-medical and largely private practice. Medical professional education, with its large doses of rote learning, is precisely the wrong preparation for psychoanalysis. Moreover, once the analyst has hung out his shingle he is in business by and for himself. More than in any other branch of medicine, the privacy of practice hinders the psychoanalyst. He lacks the sort of critical contacts with other fields that would advance his own.
In the bustle of his practice, the psychoanalyst grows more and more relaxed about his theoretical competence. He has had his dose of theory in the institutes. Theory, to the practicing psychoanalyst, is too often an ornament, good for professional meetings, to be displayed on the wall, so to speak, along with his diplomas. Commerce and psychoanalysis do not mix, despite the opening Freud left for commercial standards by his insistence on the therapeutic value of fee-taking. Of course, it is not wrong, morally or technically, to traffic in the mitigation or removal of the neuroses for money. Freud made a powerful point when he
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said that the cost of treatment is more important to the anal-ysand than the income is to the analyst. But, income may mean different things, according to the wider frame of reference in which it is placed. Fee-taking is meant to help assure the resolution of transference, to guarantee the essential impersonality behind the ostensibly intensely personal character of the psychoanalytic relationship. It is an integral part of the Freudian theory.
Any criticism of fee-taking must take place at a more profound level. The question here is: whether, by guaranteeing the professionalism and impersonality of the analytic relationship, psychoanalysis permits the full range of therapeutic possibilities. The distance between the Freudian freedom of choice and curative therapies of commitment may be bridged by the character of the analyst himself. One is inclined to believe that a cure cannot be achieved without an exemplary presence. And, in-deed, the psychoanalysts maintain the collegial romance of such a presence in their common reverence for the founding father himself. Cure, when super-added to knowledge, would be the informed acceptance of an authority figure. When it is not exemplary, an authority figure has an uncertain therapeutic effect.
The failure of the Freudians to maintain a high intellectual level as a profession is all the less excusable because they have been granted many of the conditions required for first-rate intellectual work. They have a canon, an authoritative body of writing administered by sanctioned and official cadres of teachers. This canon has favored a certain continuity of re-search, offering a significance and justification to each little piece of work that it might not possess except in reference to the whole. But even in their research, analysts have developed a false empiricism, in which their highest intellectual achievement is often nothing more than yet another report to their colleagues of a case history, complete with pious cross-references in the footnotes to show that they remember the great, who are dead,
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and the mediocre, who are alive. Paper-reading has begun to bore even the psychoanalysts themselves. In some cities it is difficult to collect even these inferior specimens of intellectual vitality. The movement is softened, its mind lulled by featherbeds of dead data, collected in the ritual act of having been published. While worrying too much about whether they are scientists in any sense of the word acceptable to their most bigoted opponents, the psychoanalysts have become at worst technicians of therapy, and at best erudites, writing up data without any sense of responsibility for their more general im-port. The curse of erudition in the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century was that it collected trivia, and cluttered the humanist culture of the time with ornamental knowledge. Psychoanalytic work is becoming ornamental to the scientific culture of our own time. False empiricism can have its own path-ology; from papers with manifest titles such as "On a Theme Suggested by One of My Patients" it is an easy move to the latent title "On a Patient Suggested by One of My Themes."
The meetings of the psychoanalytic societies produce bore-dom; it is mainly the psychoanalytic institutes that train these bores. More often than not, the contemporary candidate for training in one of the institutes now comes straight out of a medical school, with precisely the wrong kind of education, for which a reading of Freud's case histories and various other courses in the development and structure of psychoanalysis cannot compensate. The early psychoanalysts were educated men when they gathered around Freud; the contemporary psychoanalyst is not an educated man when he leaves the institute. And yet, by its own logic, the field must take the whole province of culture for its own. Sociology, for example, is only "applied psychoanalysis," according to Freud. This has been. interpreted by psychoanalysts to mean that they need not master sociology. Psychoanalysts are now writing on religion, society, art, literature, and other fields with breath-taking incompetence. Geoffrey Gorer has made the point well enough recently:
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A number of contemporary social scientists . . . have submitted themselves to the discipline of learning about psychoanalysis by systematic study and, often, by undergoing a personal analysis. But with very few exceptions ... psychoanalysts have not shown parallel humility; they have not made any systematic study of the literature of contemporary social sciences; nor, despite the vicissitudes of their lives which have often entailed emigration, have they submitted themselves to the systematic study of an unknown society, an experience which has many analogues with a personal analysis in the permanent change of focus which it produces.&
But by far the most damaging and symptomatic expression of psychoanalysts encapsulated within the limitations of their own professional training is that the analysts are, by that very educa-tion, encouraged to "cling to 'the data and hypotheses derived from clinical observation, and make extrapolations therefrom on social, anthropological, or historical themes without systematic study of the society of the period or systematic reading of the relevant literature." For this ignorance, however, freud is partly responsible, as has been shown elsewhere.?
Psychoanalytic education is still so narrowly based that the psychoanalytic candidate only rarely develops insights beyond those handed to him by his teachers-which is more a criticism of his teachers than of him. Recently, the entire pattern of psychoanalytic education in the United States has come under careful survey, and perhaps some changes for the better will occur. There are many changes that might help, including such minor items as the passing of written comprehensive examinations in cognate fields administered by external examiners. But, most of all, the institutes fail in their pedagogic function because they have no overall conception of what they are trying to do,
6 G. Gorer, "The Psychoanalytic Study of Society," Vol. I, ed. W. Muen-sterberger and S. Axelrad, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, ALIll, Parts 2-3 (March-June, 1902), PP. 188-91.
7 See Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (New York, 1961), pp. 241-00.
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nor a historical perspective on themselves. Psychoanalysis has developed a pseudo-interpretative attitude toward itself, which is the ultimate barrier to the acquisition of those critical competencies that could help a movement now almost wrecked by its own success. Meanwhile, by default, the institutes have become what most of their students ardently desire them to be: trade schools preparing them for accreditation and the good life in some suburbs, without night calls from troublesome patients.
Perhaps there are simply too many candidates. This is one field in which the supply creates its own demand. But there is not so much talent in the world, and many candidates now entering the profession are unsuited to the uniquely intellectual and emotional strain of being a psychoanalyst. The field faces the ultimate test of its own sense of responsibility as an intellectual discipline: Can it contract, in the face of all pressures to expand?
A curious mood of dissension pervades the psychoanalytic movement. At a time when they are drawn closer together, defensively, they quarrel among themselves, aggressively. The endemic and apparently arbitrary character of the dissensions has long troubled the more thoughtful analysts. Some explanation of this prevalent mood may be useful in dispelling it.
Psychoanalysis is a mature movement (over a half-century old in New York, for example) of one-time heretics, now established as the orthodox. No one is more touchy than a one-time heretic gone straight. More importantly, he has achieved his orthodoxy at a certain cost. At his best, the psychoanalyst is a person with some neurotic difficulties who has gone into psychoanalysis to help himself and, out of this trained self-conscious-ness, to help others. This is not said pejoratively. Psychoanalysis has effectively squelched the stupidly neurotic who resent and envy those who have engaged in some resolution of their misery. It is not that the psychoanalytically inclined is more neurotic than the next man, rather he is only more intelligent about his
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problems. On the other hand, intelligent "normals" are now flooding the field, and they are, characteristically, without analytic talent.
The neurotic who becomes a psychoanalyst has passed through the urgencies of his own misery and is licensed as able to help others in their own. He learns to keep his own and his patient's problems quite separate. Just his unremitting involvement in the therapeutic relation lessens the capacities of the analyst for those long-range perspectives necessary to the higher aspects of intellectual labor in his field. There is an imbalance of involvement and detachment in psychoanalysis. This psychoanalytic clinician lives professionally too near his clinic, which is too private. His imagination has been too narrowly confined within the limits of his professional education. There was a time when analysts worried whether examining the unconscious life would destroy the creativity of the artist; this fear has proved un-founded. The creativity more certainly destroyed by psychoanalytic training has been that of the psychoanalysts themselves. They remain too closely tied to their mother subject-and too badly trained in other subjects to escape paying a price, in their own capacities, for the remarkable achievements of their professional predecessors. It must be pleasing to have a father so great as Freud, and yet also frustrating in that, for practically no other reason, they cannot be great, too. And thus, in dissension, they express their ambivalence to their own field. Psychoanalysts nowadays are malcontent in their settled professional situation-but only malcontent. Their professional anxieties are thus rendered stable in professional bickering.
Nevertheless, dissension within the psychoanalytic movement is an awkward tribute to its highest virtue and most vital principle: honesty. As an ultimate rule of organization, honesty is death to organization itself. Reticence, forbearance, tolerance —these civilities and hypocrisies are necessary to organized life. A powerful woman, with savagely clear intuitions, Lou Andreas-Salome, understood the ultimate cause of dissension in the move-
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ment: its commandment of honesty. "This is the . . . reason why, within this [first psychoanalytic] circle, splits arise and disputes... and it is more difficult to settle these than any others." Being a rather cruel as well as intelligent woman, she honestly relished those fights: "It is beautiful to see men facing one another in honest battle." And, being human, she needed a father-figure in the chair, somehow remote and above the battle. Translations from one language into another can reveal motives lying deep below consciousness. In English, Andreas-Salome's reference to Freud as if he were a deity makes profound sense. Writing in her diary, she rehearsed a pretty speech never made, the peroration of which ran: "To thank all these evenings, even the dull ones, for the sake of the One who chaired them and gave them of his time."8
Writing to Oskar Pfister, Freud declared himself on the optimal traits of a psychoanalyst, without commenting on whether such traits can flourish in a professional setting: "Your analysis suffers from the hereditary weakness of virtue. It is the work of an over-decent man who feels himself obliged to be discreet. . . . Discretion is thus incompatible with a good presentation of psychoanalysis. One has to become a bad fellow, transcend the rules, sacrifice oneself, betray, and behave like the artist who buys paints with his wife's household money, or burns the furniture to warm the room for his model. Without some such criminality there is no real achievement."
There is a "criminality," a creative egoism, missing nowadays from this great and necessary profession. That egoism passed, for reasons that must be called culturally necessary, to Jung, there to be turned, with almost insane imaginative flair, against the analytic attitude itself.
8 Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, ed. H. Nunberg and E. Federn, transl. M. Nunberg (New York, 1962), I (1906-08), p. xxxi.